by Anne Valente
The server brings Billie’s drink and Rhiannon glances out the booth’s window. We talked about racing. Just for a bit. But it’s the most we’ve ever talked about it across our entire relationship.
And what did she say?
Rhiannon sighs. That I’ve been too shut off. That I should’ve talked about it long before this.
I could have told you that.
Thanks, Billie. That’s a helpful thing to say.
I just mean you should talk more about what’s bothering you. With everyone.
Rhiannon stays silent and Billie sets down her glass, condensation already building against the cold of the creamed mango, the afternoon’s heat pushing into the restaurant as the server sets their platter of appetizers on the table.
How are you feeling? Rhiannon grabs a pakora from the plate. About Dad.
I told him about Tim this morning. About what happened. He guessed. I couldn’t make myself lie.
That’s good. And?
And he thinks that’s why Mom told him not to come. I never told her what Tim did but she must have figured it out. He thinks she was protecting me.
Rhiannon leans back in the booth. Do you believe that?
I don’t know what to believe. Nothing else makes sense.
Rhiannon nods. I’ll be honest, that sounds extreme. But Mom had her reasons, clearly for everything. I always just assumed Dad was busy. Distracted. I’m sorry, Billie. I didn’t even think to ask him, or ask how you felt that he didn’t visit.
I don’t know if I would have told you anyway.
Then that makes two of us. Rhiannon eyes her. And anyway, I was distracted too. I never guessed Dad not visiting had anything at all to do with Mom.
Well, whatever the reason, I’m ready to move on.
Are you?
Dad’s not perfect. You said so yourself. But at least he’s trying now.
Rhiannon watches a gridlock of cars stop and start along the boulevard with each stoplight.
What about you? Billie tries again. How are you feeling?
Fine. I’m feeling fine.
Billie hesitates. How will you feel if this oval’s a racetrack?
Rhiannon doesn’t look at her. I don’t know, Billie. I don’t know how I’ll feel. Like I said, I don’t really want to be on the road anymore. I thought the quarry was it. But I’m here. I’m here because Mom obviously still wants us to be here.
Why do you think there’s more? Why not just end at the quarry?
What, you think I know? After hearing yesterday that Mom kept Dad from visiting you, I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know what she wants from us. I don’t know what a laser pointer means or a locket or a wedding ring. I’m tired, Billie. I don’t want to think about any of this anymore.
Billie doesn’t push any further. Are you seeing Beth when you get back?
I guess. I don’t know where we go from here. God, breakups are so messy. Do I move back in with her if she wants me to? Do I stay in the house forever, unpacking boxes and feeling sorry for myself? Both feel like moving backward. And I don’t even know if she’s interested in being with me anymore.
And are you? Interested in being with her?
Rhiannon finally looks at her. I think so. I think I always was. I just fucked it up by not wanting anything else I have in Champaign.
Don’t you think that’s understandable?
Beth probably doesn’t think it is. I jerked her around for so many years.
She probably doesn’t see it that way. It sounds like she wants to see you when you get back. Rhee, you’ll figure it out. Beth. And everything else.
Everything else. Rhiannon smiles. Like finding another job? Champaign’s such a small town. I hate that I can see why you might not want to stay there. There’s nothing there anymore. Jesus, Billie. I thought this trip would be good for me. But I feel even more lost than I did before we left.
Billie pulls a samosa from the platter. She doesn’t want to talk about whether she will or won’t stay in Champaign, a question she hears on the tip of her sister’s tongue. She wishes Rhiannon could just talk about herself for more than a few short minutes.
What about you? Rhiannon asks. We’re getting close to heading home. Have you thought about what you want to do?
Billie opens her mouth, words halted by the arrival of their entrees. Spiced chickpeas. A plate of vegetables, Rhiannon’s coconut curry. They lose their conversation to lunch, neither of them having eaten since the funeral’s reception, but Billie knows that even if she’d answered Rhiannon’s question she doesn’t know what she would have said.
AFTER LUNCH, RHIANNON steers the Mustang down the boulevard toward the coordinates, indicated by the GPS as only a short distance from the restaurant. Salt Lake City is small, Billie realizes, despite the seeming size of its downtown. Rhiannon drives with the windows rolled up, the air-conditioning blasted on high, the afternoon heat visible on the blacktop in mirrored pools beyond the windshield. They drive past what Billie sees is Salt Lake City’s main public library, a swirling marvel of nautilus-shaped architecture, and on past a water tower marked TROLLEY SQUARE, what looks like an outdoor shopping plaza. Rhiannon turns south and travels three blocks until they dead-end in a parking lot, the GPS inching toward but not yet reaching a destination.
Rhiannon cuts the engine in the parking lot. This isn’t a racetrack.
Do you remember where the racetrack was in the city?
South, now that I’m thinking of it. Rhiannon sighs. I don’t think that drawing meant a racetrack at all.
Rhiannon gestures beyond the windshield and Billie sees a canopy of greenery past the dead-end lot: a public park. A walking track circling the outer perimeter.
The entire park an oval, the shape of the drawing in the journal.
Liberty Park, Rhiannon reads from a wooden sign staked in the grass beyond the windshield. This must be it.
Rhee, I’m sorry. I thought it was a racetrack.
Why are you sorry? We don’t even know what’s here.
The coordinate’s showing a little farther into the park.
Fine. Ready to do some walking?
Rhiannon leaves the Mustang’s windows cracked to diffuse the heat and Billie follows her into the park with the GPS in her palms. Rhiannon says nothing and Billie can’t tell if she’s disappointed or relieved that they’re somewhere other than a raceway. Rhiannon walks ahead of her as they move down the park’s central thoroughfare, a paved trail lined on both sides with tall rows of cottonwoods. Leaves lime bright against the fallow blue of the western sky and Billie still can’t believe how vivid the colors are out here in the absence of low clouds and rain. They head away from the park’s perimeter populated by joggers and a few in-line skaters and move into the interior, past basketball and tennis courts toward a playground filled with children. Jungle gyms and swing sets bloom with toddlers. Concrete channels of rushing water surround the playground, man-made creeks where kids splash in swimsuits and plastic floaties. Rhiannon glances back and Billie shakes her head, the GPS still charting them toward the other end of the park. The heat dampens any talk between them and Billie walks behind her sister in silence. They pass signs for a public pool, a greenhouse. They keep walking until they ascend a sloped hill to a glittering lake on the other side, mallard ducks kicking through the water. The light beats off the lake’s ripples and glints from the peaked mountains in the distance, visible from the lakefront. Billie breathes. A manicured landscape, no less beautiful in its own way than a red-rocked mesa or a trail spiraling up a mountain switchback. This park the polar opposite of a prison yard, nothing more than dirt mounds of anthills and thin patches of crabgrass. They keep walking down the path along the edge of the lake until the GPS beeps, their destination finally reached.
What the hell are we supposed to find here? Rhiannon says. This lake is huge.
Billie shakes her head. I guess we should’ve driven to this side of the park instead.
Do you see anything? Anythi
ng at all that looks like something Mom would mark?
Billie holds a hand over her eyes and sees a family of five on a blanket spread in the grass. The reflection of trees shimmering in the water. Canada geese. Mallard ducklings. The arch of a footbridge leading from their side of the lake to a shaded island in the middle. Everything sky blue and lush green that she doesn’t even think to look away from the lake.
Billie, Rhiannon says.
Billie looks up and Rhiannon’s eyes are fixed on the other side of the path. When Billie follows her line of sight she sees what Rhiannon sees and knows immediately.
Tracy Aviary.
A menagerie of birds. Its entrance wide, its sign huge. What Billie can’t believe she missed. What she knows for sure is the destination their mother intends for them, or else for her alone: not a racetrack at all.
Billie glances at Rhiannon, her face indecipherable.
It looks like a big place, is all Rhiannon says. How the hell are we going to find anything in there?
Billie says nothing. Billie knows exactly where to look.
AFTER RHIANNON PAYS their admission and they move along a boardwalk that takes them across a lake filled with pelicans and beyond another shallow pool crammed with neon-pink flamingos, Billie follows the map the attendant gave them straight to the exhibit she knows to seek. Utah’s raptors. The main attraction a lone bald eagle, not what their mother has led them here to find. Billie moves past the eagle and past the turkey vultures and the American kestrels to the exact enclosure.
The red-tailed hawk. Mottled auburn. Russet feathers. Coffee-colored irises bearing down from a perch, Rhiannon and Billie the only patrons in the entire exhibit. Despite the ferruginous hawks pinwheeling above the western highways of Utah and New Mexico and despite the few pigeons and cardinals she saw flitting against the Midwestern gray from her small bunk window in Decatur, Billie hasn’t seen a red-tailed hawk since she left Jacksonville.
Alabama.
The aviary’s hawk looks exactly like her.
Goddamn, Rhiannon whispers.
Billie says nothing, a cyclone whirling inside the walls of her chest. She knows they’ll find the plastic box here, what she dreads to open and see what her mother has left. Because it will be for her, as crushing as the blade of a hawk feather in Carlsbad. Because it won’t be for Rhiannon, two talismans planted for Billie and none for her sister. Billie glances at Rhiannon squinting beneath the sun, her face betraying nothing. Billie bends below the sign that describes the red-tailed hawk’s range and eating habits and scans the wooden fence that separates the walking path from the hawk’s chain-link enclosure. Her hands almost touch the cage’s rusted metal, the hawk’s beaded eyes flickering with her movements. Her hands find nothing. Her hands continue trawling the edge where the enclosure meets the grass, dragging through tall weeds until they meet rough plastic.
Billie closes her eyes. The unclouded afternoon sun magenta hot through the shade of her eyelids. She grabs the box and stands. Gray plastic. The same as every other box they’ve found. A red-tailed hawk feather in Carlsbad: her mother already twisting a knife. Her mother telling her father to never visit. And now here: Billie has no idea what else her mother can say about her once-life and every way it failed.
You want me to open it? Rhiannon asks.
Billie shakes her head. The sun directly overhead, heavy on her scalp and shoulders. Billie squeezes the box, the plastic clasp popping open. Inside, the small sheet of paper. A sketched oval upon it. The drawing in the journal. The matched coordinates scrawled beside it. And beneath the paper, what Billie knows by touch alone before she pulls them from the box: two jesses. The thin silk of leather straps sliding through her fingers, straps Billie once attached to Alabama’s feet to keep her perched and secure. Billie pulls them from the box and holds them to the sunlight, the red-tailed hawk in the enclosure blinking down at them. Two straps that tethered Alabama to Billie’s arm before Billie untied them the night Tim broke her brow bone, the night she watched Alabama hesitate only a moment before taking noiselessly to the sky.
Billie turns them over in her palms. A small A branded into the tail end of both straps. Her mother must have kept them. Slid them quietly into her pocket when her family cleared all her things from Tim’s house in Jacksonville.
Billie, Rhiannon says.
Billie shakes her head. Doesn’t want to hear Rhiannon say a word. The mess of the funeral, her mother telling her father not to visit, all of it sharpening the jesses into blades. She holds the straps limp in her hand and slides the plastic box into her pocket, the afternoon sky sweltering, more unbearable than the ridgeline of a quarry. A funeral not enough. No ceremony enough to remind Billie of everything she left behind, everything she fucked up. A feather in Carlsbad inadequate. Too weak a reminder. The jesses in her hands, something she owned. Something she fastened to Alabama’s talons. Something she untied herself, her mother no longer twisting a knife but driving it right in.
A LINE OF pool tables. Budweiser awnings shedding cones of light above them. No windows. A tube television above the bar local-broadcasting afternoon golf. A dive called X Wife’s Place across the street from Liberty Park, the nearest bar open on a Sunday in a liquor-lawed city. Rhiannon asking through the heated haze of the aviary if Billie wanted to take a break, spend the night in the city. If she wanted to look ahead at last in the journal to see if any coordinates were left, if she wanted to take off down Interstate 80 toward home, straight across Wyoming and Nebraska and on to Iowa and Illinois. Billie shaking her head, the journal buried in her daypack. No decisions. No thinking at all. She sits across from Rhiannon in a scarlet-vinyl booth in the corner of the bar, two whiskeys on the table between them, the jesses still curled in her palms against the condensation of her glass. She knows they must pierce Rhiannon just as much, her sister expecting a racetrack, but she can’t find the words to ask.
I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm by these, Rhiannon is saying.
Billie nods. Maybe not, she thinks. But there it is. Her father’s presence at the quarry. Her mother’s six-year secret of keeping him away from Decatur. A man in Colorado Springs. Gnarled-up cunt. A man in Jacksonville, a man who nearly killed every part of her. A man in Cortez, a moonlit pool not enough to forget. Billie feels the tide of grief pressing in at last, the jesses its final pull. Her mother keeping her father away to shield her from every single man, even the one who made her. How it meant her mother knew what Tim did, even if she never said a word. A line of women keeping secrets. A line of women avoiding words too fucking hard to say. The only thing left in Illinois when Billie returns a cemetery that awaits her long-due visit and out here in Utah only carefully placed relics, a bread-crumb trail she and Rhiannon have followed across the entire West to arrive where, Billie doesn’t know, the jesses clutched in her hands.
I know how you feel, Rhiannon says. Maybe she thought these reminders of our old lives would be rejuvenating. That they would set us back on the right paths.
I don’t know what the right path is.
I don’t either. I don’t feel anything but exhausted.
Billie sips her whiskey, a sugar burn creeping down the trail of her throat. Do you really think it’s clear? That she meant this trip as a reminder?
Rhiannon sighs. At this point, I have no fucking idea what she meant this trip to be. We’ve retraced so many of her pivotal steps, Billie. We’ve been reminded the entire way of our own steps, how we aren’t following them anymore. What else could it be?
No, my steps, Billie says. Me specifically. That I’m not following them anymore. She’s left nothing for you, Rhee. And I’m sure on the surface that looks bad. But to me it seems like she’s saying that you don’t need any help at all.
Rhiannon is quiet and Billie listens to the drone of golf announcers on television, the whir of two standing fans circulating air through the swampy bar. The smack of pool balls breaking across a table. The suede-smooth texture of the leather straps in her hands. She pu
lls her daypack from the vinyl bench and reaches her hands in and scatters across the liquor-sticky table everything they’ve gathered, everything their mother left them across seven days of states. The locket: its short gold chain, the cherubic portraits of her mother and her aunt sealed inside. The fossilized tail spike of a stegosaurus. The thin blade of a red-tailed hawk feather. An astronomer’s laser pointer. A jigsaw puzzle’s lone piece. The ghost of a wedding ring the only absence, what Billie will face when they meet Oscar in St. Louis. And now, here: Alabama’s jesses. Rhiannon looks away and Billie plants her hands on the table.
Tell me, she says. What the hell kind of story do these things tell you?
We don’t even know who left these. We’ve already been to her funeral and we don’t even know how all these things got out here.
Rhiannon avoids her question. Billie won’t let her. Does it even matter? she says. I don’t care who left them. We’re here. We’re here with these things and I’m so fucking tired of trying to guess what she wants from us. So tell me, Rhee. What kind of story do we have here?
Rhiannon doesn’t meet Billie’s eyes, her jaw clenching inside her closed mouth.
Fine, Rhiannon finally says. The locket. Mom and Aunt Sue. You and me. Mom wanted this trip to begin with us, both of us traveling together, both of us on the same page. For me, that’s why she also began with their wedding ring. Their marriage, yes, and where she started her graduate work and career. But also where both of us began. Where she met Dad. We wouldn’t have been possible without it. The stegosaurus fossil. The beginning of her life’s work, of proving another scientist wrong and setting down her own path. The hawk feather. Your path. What used to make you happiest. The laser pointer. Fuck if I know. Being out in the wild, being free. Looking up at a clearer sky than anything we could have seen in Illinois. The jigsaw piece. That a degree of mystery might be worth something. Even if it drove her crazy throughout her career. That she didn’t know the answers to everything. That she spent her life searching regardless. And now Alabama’s jesses. You again. Your path. What you left behind. You.