The Desert Sky Before Us

by Anne Valente

  Her father. Her father here. Her father here in this place that has become a space for her and Rhiannon alone. Her father in Utah, six fucking states away from Illinois but never once in the visitors’ room in Decatur. And Rhiannon. Billie doesn’t want to think of her as the Mustang finds the end of the quarry’s gravel road and meets the highway. Who shuttled her out here. Who visited her every month even if she lied, every goddamn month except the last three of a seventy-two-month sentence. Who picked her up at the curb of the Correctional Center and made her a room back home. Who wants her to stay in Champaign beyond probation. And in thanks: Billie grabbing keys that aren’t hers to grab and running toward a car that isn’t hers to drive. But the impossibility of her father. A funeral. Every single one of Billie’s muscles screaming no.

  Billie wants none of it at all.

  The desert is a panorama beyond the Mustang’s windshield and her sneakers push hard on the gas, no cops and no speed limit signs in such a desolate place. No gas stations. No roadside dives. Barely any other cars at all. The sun slicks hot off the hood and the Uinta and Wasatch mountains span off to the north, so wide open Billie feels her eyes water just looking at them.

  There is no aim. No place to be. There is nothing to do, nothing to find. There is only a car shuttling across the West, not the liberation their mother intended for them out here but the one Billie will take. Her mother. Her father. Rhiannon standing beside the picnic table. What their family is now. Billie presses the gas and feels her eyes sting and it is not for the beauty of the mountains.

  BILLIE STEERS THE Mustang until she sees a gravel recess marked as a scenic pullout. One tin-roof hut, no more than a glorified carport sheltering a single picnic table. Billie slows down and pulls in and lets herself sit in the shade on top of the picnic table beneath the lone hut, her feet resting on the bench. Before her lies a span of mountains beyond mountains. She lets her gaze fall out of focus against the line of Wasatch peaks in the distance. She exhales and closes her eyes. This week. More land than Billie has seen across her entire lifetime. Sun-saturated sky. Hawks wheeling. The muscle memory of Alabama on her arm, an arm once unscathed by gasoline burn. When did you feel alive? Her mother’s hand passing a journal of coordinates across a prison table. This desert. This fucking light.

  At the quarry after their ridgeline hike, she’d sat in the trailer alone. The window cracked open. Rhiannon on the phone below the window’s screen, her voice drifting in. Calling Beth. What this trip had made her do. What it could make Billie do too. What their mother wanted her to feel standing at the quarry when she was only fifteen. IV drips. Catheter lines. Bags of saline and blood. What Rhiannon witnessed in the hospital room and Billie imagined from the prison yard pressing her hands to the chain links of a metal fence. To see her mother alive past a prison sentence, past the weight of her own mistake. To take back the gasoline and strewn books if she’d have known they’d cost her the nearness of her mother in the last six years of her life. The heaviness of her own stupidity is the only thing Billie feels at all out here. These breath-stealing mountains and apricot sunsets and colossal sweeps of open plains and even still she can’t breathe, a landscape that meant everything to her mother, a landscape that only breaks Billie open.

  And her father.

  Her father there to see all of it.

  To see her remorse. To feel vindicated that he never came once.

  Billie hears the gravel crunch of a single car decelerate into the lot and come to a stop. She keeps her fingers to her forehead, her eyes focused on the wood of the bench beneath her sneakers. She doesn’t look up when she feels a hand soft on her shoulder.

  Billie.

  She has known Marcus only a day but recognizes his voice.

  Billie, it’s time to head back.

  She doesn’t look up. How did you find me?

  There’s only one highway out here. Not many places to stop. And that bright-red Mustang. You’re easier to find than you think.

  I fucked up, she hears herself say. She doesn’t know if she means the car and the keys or if she means everything at once, all six years of it. She looks up and wants Marcus to be angry. But he says nothing and extends his hand and Billie looks beyond him to his car and sees Rhiannon waiting in the passenger seat.

  She knew you shouldn’t drive back yourself, Marcus says. Without a license.

  Billie nods. No words come out of her mouth.

  Want to ride back with me? Or do you want to ride with Rhiannon?

  Billie sees Rhiannon glance through the window and emerge from the car and Billie knows there is no choice, that she will drive back to the quarry with her sister.

  I’M SORRY, BILLIE says. The hum of the engine surrounding both of them as Rhiannon follows Marcus back to the quarry.

  Rhiannon doesn’t look at her. You don’t think, Billie. You just do.

  Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

  It is when you burn down a library. It is when you flee a bar and no one can find you until you get into a fight. It is when you take a fucking set of keys without a license and take off down the highway. Jesus, Billie. Do you think of anyone but yourself?

  Billie leans against the passenger window. Her mother and father. Her sister climbing into a car with Marcus to find her. Billie thinking of absolutely everyone in her family and the impossibility of her own place within it. A family of doing. A family where she still would have fucked up if she’d never gone to prison, falconry still just a hobby. No place for awards or recognition, for ambition or drive. But she wants her mother here. Here. She wants her father here, too, despite everything.

  Look, I know you’re mad, Rhiannon says. I know you don’t want to see him.

  Billie looks at her. Did you know he’d be here?

  I didn’t even get the chance to talk to him, thanks to your bullshit. I have no idea why he’s here. He should be in Colorado. He must have kept driving to be here for us.

  For us. Billie can’t help the salt in her voice. He’s not here for us.

  Then why the hell else would he be here? He’s already buried her. He’s already been to a funeral. Once is surely enough.

  Maybe he’s here for her wedding ring. You said he wanted it back.

  He knows it’s in St. Louis. Christ, Billie. You have every right to be upset but he’s not a monster. Is it so hard to imagine that he’s here for you?

  Rhiannon steers the Mustang back up toward the quarry and Billie wants to tell her that it is. That he must be here for Rhiannon and not for her, a ridiculous span of miles from Illinois to Utah when he could have simply visited her in Decatur but never did. The last time she saw him at her sentencing, two guards dragging her from the courtroom and she’d glanced back to see both of her parents sitting in the front row, her mother weeping and her father watching her go, his face stonewalled and blank.

  By the time they reach the quarry, the sun tilts west in the sky and Billie knows it is almost time for the funeral. The cold cuts and jars of pickles have long been cleared. Angela nowhere in sight. Marcus disappears into his trailer, leaving them to themselves. And their father: sitting alone, his hands folded on the picnic table.

  Billie watches as Rhiannon approaches him and he draws her into a hug. Watches his face, lines worn and grooved. Hands, taut and leathered, clasping Rhiannon’s shoulders. Gasoline-worn palms. A mechanic’s world he thought their mother never understood, no more than Billie understood how a father could let his skin wrinkle and his hair lighten into white-dusted tufts without speaking to his daughter once.

  She doesn’t move. Stands in shorts and a tank top, scars currenting down her left arm in ripples of flame-hardened skin. Every evidence of what she’s done. What’s been done to her. A past she carries beneath a layer, her skin its own sediment. What her father can’t see. The only layer he can: a flame she lit and threw herself. She looks at him and knows that all he understood was a daughter burning down her own life. A daughter thinking only of herself. What Rhiannon said. Run
ning with boys all across high school through cornfields, always sneaking out, only to do nothing with her college degree but follow one more boy to Jacksonville.

  Her father walks toward her, an arm’s length away.

  Billie, he says.

  She feels her scars gleam in the heat of the sun.

  He says nothing. Not sorry. But he reaches toward her with the same hug that enveloped Rhiannon and Billie wants to stay planted but thinks of her mother and the ashes that will take to so much wind and for once she just wants to belong. She notices he still wears his wedding ring. She feels herself step toward him. His once-sweatshirt, the Illinois woods. His arms are around her and she lets herself be held.

  What are you doing here? she whispers against the rough fabric of his shirt. What the fuck are you doing here?

  Her voice on the verge of breaking but she won’t let it. Steels herself. Hears him whisper back I’m here for you girls, I’m always here for you and she wants to scream. You were never here she wants to shout but feels her limbs slacken in his arms.

  BILLIE CAN RECALL only one funeral in her entire life. Her uncle Mike, her father’s brother. An unexplained heart attack in his early fifties. Billie remembers a quick ceremony in Pekin where her father’s family still lived, a musty funeral home peppered with only two dozen people then a private burial with immediate family, a still-humid September day followed by a fast lunch at a Hardee’s along the highway. Fried chicken and instant mashed potatoes, tastes Billie still associates with loss.

  She still doesn’t know what’s customary for a funeral but knows this one is more than ordinary. Angela has situated a small fire ring made of thick stones at the ridgeline’s edge. Several bundles of sage smoke in the center, the grassy scent billowing off to the valley with the high afternoon winds. Five folding chairs circle the fire ring. The surrounding mesas, a panorama. And the ashes, what Billie knows are only bits of rock and dust, sit beside the fire ring in a green plastic urn.

  Hell of a funeral, her father mutters beside her and Rhiannon, all three of them standing along the ridgeline waiting for Angela to begin. Where do you think someone bought that urn? At Home Depot? It looks like a watering can.

  Billie doesn’t want to laugh, doesn’t want to give her father an inch but can’t help herself, that they’ve all driven way out here for only burned bundles of weeds. Her mother’s doing. She wonders if this, too, was intended as levity. Despite the mess of emotions swirling in her gut, she stuffs a brief burst of laughter back into her throat out of respect for Angela and Marcus, out of letting her father know that a single hug doesn’t make them family again.

  Marcus approaches and asks if they need anything. Bottles of water. Jackets to block the wind. Rhiannon shakes her head. Marcus moves to Billie’s other side, just beyond earshot of her sister and father.

  How are you? he asks. Feeling better?

  I’m fine.

  Marcus places a hand on her left arm despite its visible scars, her shoulders barely covered. Billie flinches in reflex but Marcus doesn’t move.

  Did my mother plan all this? she whispers.

  The plastic urn was your mother’s idea. But she’s probably not responsible for the sage. Angela’s a fan of burning it in her trailer. I think your mother found it calming too.

  And the view? Why are we up here along the ridgeline?

  Definitely your mother. I think Angela told you she loved the hiking trails up here.

  Billie feels a pinprick pierce her rib cage. That Marcus knows what her mother found calming, even what she loved.

  It’s time, Angela calls to them from the fire ring. Come have a seat.

  Billie follows her father and sister toward the line of chairs.

  Angela sits beside them. We’re gathered here to honor a mother, she begins. And a wife. And one of the best researchers I’ve ever had the privilege to work with.

  Billie wants to be the bigger person but the word grinds, a metal she tongues inside her mouth. Wife. Her mother nothing of her father’s wife, not since Billie was a sophomore in high school, a term he has no right to claim.

  I don’t have much to say, Angela continues. Margaret never sent me a script. But I can say with certainty that she’d have loved knowing all of you were here. She loved this place. The high desert up here spoke to her in a way I’ve never seen it do with any other researcher. She knew the land. It was a privilege to watch her skill at work, to see her uncovering so much that no one else would have noticed.

  Billie glances at Rhiannon. Her sister’s face unreadable. She sits in the folding chair beside Billie, leaned forward, her elbows on her knees.

  But this ceremony isn’t about me, Angela says. Rhiannon, Billie. Jim. Please feel free to say a few words.

  Their father is the first to volunteer, a limelight Billie is sure he can’t resist. I’m glad we can all be here together, he begins. It’s been so long since that was the case. Billie feels her palms curl around the seat of her chair, her knuckles tightening. As if it’s her fault and not his that it’s been so long. How they could have all been together in the prison’s visiting center if he’d just come down from Chicago.

  I’m glad we can do this, he says. For you, Billie. Since you couldn’t be there.

  Billie feels her teeth clench. Another dig. As if she hadn’t wanted to be there. As if she hadn’t pushed her palms against a prison-yard fence in the low March rain to press herself in the cardinal direction of home.

  I felt it was important to be here, for all of us to be together for this. For you girls.

  Girls. Billie closes her eyes. A word that meant something when they were small. A word that means nothing now, nearly as dismissive as ladies.

  I’ve never been out here, he says, but I can tell by its light that it’s a place your mother would have loved. She was always drawn to light. To life. To anything that lived.

  Except you, Billie hears herself say.

  Billie, Rhiannon warns.

  This place was her life’s work, their father continues. How special to be here all together, in a spot that meant so much to her.

  Billie hears only that he’s never been here in his life. That she’s the only one. An easy excuse for Rhiannon, traveling always on a racing circuit. But her father, her mother’s once-husband: it was his job to love what she loved. It was his job to know the chisels and dental picks she scraped across the earth, to know firsthand what it was to stand beneath shards of sunlight looking out across so many mountains and to uncover the first edge of bone that would become an entire skeleton, to know how it felt to stand here and see the age of so many rocks, a visual history, every mystery they held.

  A jigsaw piece. Paleontological puzzle. Her mother’s belief that this land held multiple disasters. Angela’s words. Her mother resolute that across sixty-five million years so many bones might have undergone every ravage of flood and famine a population could take. The same as a marriage. Disaster. How her father’s disinterest must have razed her mother. The same dismissal Billie always internalized from Tim.

  Her trip here at fifteen only six years before she met him, how slim a window. She sits up in her folding chair and scans the ridgeline, mesas and mountains she barely remembers. Recalls only her mother showing her the process of excavation. How to detect bone. How to spot a fragment, the right shape and size. Tiny fossils. Crinoids. So small Billie never knew about the full-scale skeleton her mother discovered. No drills, no hammers. No boulder-size slabs of rock. Only a dental pick pulled from the pocket of her cargo pants and Billie crouching down to examine what her mother uncovered.

  Fifteen, Billie sees now: just one year before her parents divorced.

  She always sensed it threatened her father that her mother might know more about the world than he did. That she had a PhD, despite having the same blue-collar upbringing as him. The first complete stegosaur skeleton, what she and Rhiannon never knew. What Billie wonders now, watching her father drone on: whether he ever cared. If her mother brought h
er here at fifteen not because she saw Rhiannon take to racing and Billie take to nothing at all but because Billie was available, the one daughter she could show an entire world beyond the confines of a relationship, what a woman could do on her own and what Billie ignored, moving on to college and to a relationship that would break her.

  How lucky we are to be here, her father is saying. To be where Margaret would have wanted us to be. To honor her in a way we couldn’t before, all of us together now.

  Stop, Billie says.

  Billie, Rhiannon says again.

  Her father keeps talking and Billie feels her hands leave the folding chair. Empty words masked as elegy. She won’t take it. She stands and hears Rhiannon’s chair scrape the gravel behind her but she is already crossing the fire ring through the smoke of so much sage and she is grabbing the urn with the same texture as the watering can in their Urbana backyard where her mother once grew poppies and she is pulling open the canister that carries nothing but pulverized rock and dirt and she is scattering what’s inside across the edge of the ridgeline.

  JONES, SHARMA. “MORRISON FORMATION.” NORTH AMERICAN GEOLOGY OF PALEONTOLOGICAL SITES. ED. NICHOLAS RUFINA. SALT LAKE CITY: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS, 2012. 22–26. PRINT.

  CALL NUMBER: QE170 .B18 2012

  MORRISON FORMATION

  The Morrison Formation is a widespread area of sedimentary rock that has proven most fertile in containing Jurassic period dinosaur bones. Spanning the states of Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, and Idaho, it covers approximately 600,000 square miles. Though a percentage of the formation has been excavated, 75 percent of its fossils are still buried within its layers of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone.