The Desert Sky Before Us

by Anne Valente

  Billie hears the strain in her sister’s voice, the only hint she’ll give. That among every one of the objects Rhiannon has listed, none of them are for her.

  And what about your path? Billie says.

  I don’t think this trip is about me.

  I think it is.

  Rhiannon rolls her eyes. You just said it was. Your steps.

  Yeah, I think it’s a reminder of where I went wrong. But it’s about you, too. It’s about both of us. So tell it to me again, Rhee. Tell me the story here.

  I don’t know the fucking story, Billie. A hawk feather. Two jesses. Those messages are clearly for you. That’s the story.

  You really think that’s true?

  Yes, goddammit, Rhiannon nearly shouts. And you’re crazy if you think Mom brought you all the way out here just to make you feel like shit. They might be a reminder. But you heard Dad tell you himself. She meant to protect you. For six years. And now she wants you to take control of your own future. And what about me, Billie? What the fuck is out here for me?

  Mom wanted you out here. All these other objects were for both of us. I just need more help. It’s obvious. But she wanted you out here too.

  Yeah, as your driver. To shuttle you out here. I already said goodbye in March.

  Did you?

  Rhiannon says nothing and Billie pulls their mother’s journal from the daypack and slides it across the table.

  Open it, she says. To the next page. Just open it.

  It’s not my journal. She didn’t give it to me.

  She gave it to both of us. So open it. We might not be done. You might get the last coordinate of the entire journey. Open it, Rhee. Tell me if we’re going anywhere else.

  Rhiannon looks away, lines of tension chiseling her jaw. So many objects, what Billie guesses can have only been left by BLM workers across so many states. Everyone her mother knew. Favors pulled. How someone at almost every location knew of her mother and her work. People who knew her work better than Billie ever did. Rhiannon finally sets down her whiskey glass and pulls open the journal’s pages, past the first T. rex sketch, past the drawing and coordinates for Carlsbad, what Billie can see from across the table. Rhiannon turns the page past the drawn oval for Salt Lake City and tilts the journal toward herself and Billie can’t see what the next page holds.

  What? Billie says. What is it?

  Rhiannon looks up, her face blank. Rhiannon’s gaze drifts past their corner booth and beyond Billie’s head to the small rectangle of the tube television above the bar growing louder. The bartender aiming the remote and raising the volume. Rhiannon’s attention vanishing from the objects fanned across the table. Billie looking up at the television, Sunday golf suspended. The bartender standing below the television, neck craned up, knuckles resting on his hip bones. The tower fans whirring. The crack of pool balls halting. Everyone in the thin crowd of the bar looking up.

  Breaking news. Another plane.

  A newscaster standing in a field above the televised headline: EIGHTH PLANE CRASHES IN WYOMING.

  Along Interstate 80. The same highway Rhiannon mentioned taking back to Illinois right before they headed to the bar.

  Billie looks back at her sister, Rhiannon’s eyes still fastened to the television and her hands loosened from the journal and Billie sees the next page splayed wide open on the table, a page with no coordinates or drawings, a page filled only with blank space.

  ALEXANDER, KATE. “RISING TURBULENCE REQUIRES BETTER IN-FLIGHT DETECTION.” HUFFINGTON POST. 15 JUNE 2016. WEB.

  Rising Turbulence Requires Better In-Flight Detection

  Given the recent crashes of seven commercial planes, half of which are assumed to have been caused by what is known as clear-air turbulence, it is to our benefit to not only discuss probable cause but engage in possible prevention. This week marks the closure of most major world airports, including international hubs such as London’s Heathrow and Tokyo’s Narita International. Rather than risk continued closures and declining airline sales, discussion of turbulence prevention is imperative.

  Most commercial airplanes detect turbulence in cloud-covered areas, but not in seemingly clear skies. Computer models can be improved to more accurately discern areas of clear-air turbulence. Dr. Caroline Moreno, a researcher with the Department of Meteorology, has proposed a laser-based system equipped to the nose of all commercial airliners that would identify clear-air turbulence along the plane’s path before dangerous air is reached.

  While some climatologists suggest that the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to global warming will increase flight turbulence, there is no evidence at this time correlating an unfortunate string of air tragedies to climate change.

  40.7608º N, 111.8910º W:

  Salt Lake City, UT

  The late afternoon sun is white hot beyond the bar’s front doors. Rhiannon sees only burned afterimages when she blinks. Traffic shuttles beyond the curb, the routine of early rush hour, as if the news has stayed inside the bar. Rhiannon wonders if each car is filled with news radio, every single driver coming to the realization that random catastrophe has become an unquestionable pattern. Billie emerges behind her, her daypack slung across her shoulder.

  Rhee, Billie says.

  Rhiannon closes her eyes. Another one.

  I know. Take it easy.

  Fuck, Billie.

  We’ll find another way home. Another route if the highway’s closed.

  I don’t care about the fucking highway. People are dead. More people are fucking dead. And there’s nothing left in that journal. We have nowhere else to go.

  Rhiannon tries to remember what the breaking-news broadcaster said before she fled the bar: a United route between Minneapolis and Las Vegas, a flight number she can’t remember. A crash outside Laramie, Wyoming, along Interstate 80 at the edge of Medicine Bow National Forest. An estimated 214 people on board. The flight path normal if not slightly northern, what the newscaster claimed was avoidance of a thunderstorm system sweeping across Nebraska. A wall of black clouds spanned across the highway: what Rhiannon knows from their own drive across Missouri. Heavy wind. Enough to blow a semi off the interstate. Enough to push a plane out of the sky. Or else the same kind of turbulence she experienced on the flight that made her never fly again: blue skies. What this plane surely sought in avoiding thunderstorms. A clear route. The unexpected shaking of a plane’s cabin, a cockpit’s black box going silent. The notebook’s empty page flickers in Rhiannon’s brain, so inconsequential to the wrangle of metal on a television screen but she feels her lungs break inside her chest and can’t tell if it’s the plane or the journal.

  The end of the coordinates. The last one, for Billie. None of them for her.

  Rhiannon wishing for days that they would just head back to Illinois.

  Rhiannon surprised at how much it kills her that they will.

  We can go home, Billie says softly. That’s where we can go.

  Rhiannon turns and looks at her. What home? The one filled with boxes we’re supposed to sort through? The one with nothing left at all but what our family no longer is? You haven’t lived there for years, Billie. Mom’s gone. Dad hasn’t lived there since you were in high school. I’m only there because I have to be. Because I fucked everything up with Beth. You and I don’t have a home. We don’t have anything. Not even any idea what the fuck we should do next.

  Billie places a hand on her shoulder and Rhiannon flinches away.

  She left one last note for you, Rhiannon says. She left nothing for me.

  I wouldn’t call it a note.

  At least she left something. For you. Billie, there’s nothing left of her at all. Except for this stupid fucking road trip that’s clearly been all about you.

  The journal doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a blank page.

  Then why did we follow it if it doesn’t mean anything? Of course it means something. It means everything. It means all the life she had left to live that she didn’t get to live so she
sent us instead. To see everything she was able to see while she could. To say goodbye. To let you see so many states of this fucking country after seeing only one small corner of the same state for six years. But guess what. That’s it. You. This was all about you. I’m just the vehicle. The driver. The one who got you out here. This was always about you, the daughter she missed for so many years while I was always right beside her in Champaign.

  What, you think she took you for granted?

  Maybe. Maybe she did.

  She talked about you every time she visited.

  And told you what? That I sat by her bedside in the hospital? That I held her hand through chemo treatments that in the end only made her sicker?

  She told me she was glad to have you close. She never took you for granted.

  Rhiannon stands by the curb beneath the oppressive heat and imagines a hospital room, drawn curtains, the low hum of the craned television in the corner. I Love Lucy. The room’s lights dimmed, black and white flickering blue through the dark. Her mother asleep, hands folded like wings across her lap. Antiseptics and IV bandages and the incessant beep of the heart monitor. Her mother’s life ticked down to seconds. Rhiannon doing nothing but sitting in a stiff hospital chair and watching it happen.

  I was only a caretaker, she whispers. I was only there to watch her go.

  You weren’t, Billie says.

  Then what the fuck was I?

  You were a driver.

  Rhiannon looks up and Billie is watching her.

  You said so yourself. You’re the vehicle. You’re the driver.

  Fuck you.

  Billie says nothing but doesn’t back away and Rhiannon realizes too late, the words already spit, that Billie means something else. Not picking Billie up at the curb of a correctional center. Not this trip. Not a vessel for transportation and meals and funds.

  A driver.

  What she used to be.

  What her mother knew she did best.

  Beyond coordinates and drawings and plastic geocached boxes. The simple fact of moving across pavement. Of accelerating, the engine’s drone a rough lullaby. Of logging miles, of watching a speedometer’s count grow across a wide road. Of letting the landscape track through a windshield and recede in a rearview mirror. Of feeling wind whip across the side mirrors and into the open windows of the car’s cabin.

  Rhiannon feels the sun’s heat pulse down on her face and hears the television murmur through the bar when a patron opens the door. Two hundred and fourteen passengers. Two hundred and fourteen lives. And what the fuck was she doing with her one small life. Avoiding everything. White-knuckling her last flight before taking to the road, not for races but for the dulled drone of delivering textbooks. Not the wheel of a stock car. Not the face of a woman she loved but couldn’t make herself hand over everything completely. Two hundred and fourteen passengers. So much devastation Rhiannon feels sitting hard on her breastbone. Interstate 80 closed. Their only route east. And west: she knows America’s highways like a lit constellation.

  A driver.

  West on I-80 instead, the opposite direction of where they need to go to get home. Rather than heading east toward Wyoming and Nebraska and Iowa and finally Illinois: go west. Toward Nevada. Toward a place she once passed on a race route but never stopped to see, a place she can’t believe is this close, her mother’s doing in bringing them to Salt Lake City. She pulls the Mustang’s keys from her pocket and heads across the street toward the car and hears Billie follow.

  A driver.

  She will show her mother just how good.

  WEST. THE HIGHWAY a vector straight across Utah. An interstate bending only once, a dip south around the Great Salt Lake before straightening into an arrow shot direct from Salt Lake City to the Nevada state line. Rhiannon keeps the radio off and the car stable, Billie silent beside her. No questions. Rhiannon’s turn to take the car where she will.

  The sun slices down the horizon straight ahead and sinks toward the mountains, jagged peaks of cobalt. Flat plains of red rock surround the car and grow whiter as they travel, dotted by green tufts of marsh grass. As if they were driving into the ocean. All of western Utah a former ancient sea. Lake Bonneville. What once spanned so much of the American West, Rhiannon remembers Billie telling her, before receding with the last Ice Age and leaving behind only salt.

  Their mother. Their mother in a hospital bed. Hooked to a heart monitor that skyrocketed then plateaued before slowing to a flatline. Rhiannon still holding her hand. Every nurse ready. Rhiannon the only one in the room who wasn’t. An end. An end in a hospital room and an end beside a grave and an end on the quarry’s ridgeline, none of them closure, none of them any kind of goodbye. What still feels undone out here across the desert, her mother leaving Billie jesses and Rhiannon nothing, nothing but the face slap of a blank white page.

  Two hundred and fourteen passengers. Inconceivable.

  She and Billie’s destination now: a place she and her father never visited.

  A place she’s only dreamed but never seen.

  It doesn’t take long to get there. Ninety minutes from Salt Lake City. Past clumps of marsh grass and puddles of saltwater along the highway. Low water levels making this landscape ideal for summer racing, marsh water receded by May. Summer. Rhiannon realizes it’s solstice, the longest day of light. And now, deepest darkness. The longest possible day for two hundred and fourteen families waiting to hear from their loved ones. Changing weather. What her mother knew. Rhiannon wonders if water levels have been low not since May but since January or earlier amid so much drought. This level desert making this place a hallmark of racing since the turn of the twentieth century.

  The Bonneville Salt Flats.

  One of the flattest, most windless landscapes on earth.

  Land-speed records. Stock cars and motorcycles making pilgrimages every summer. Kitty O’Neil. A woman’s highest land-speed record set in Oregon’s Alvord Desert in 1976. Five hundred and twelve miles per hour. A speed the Mustang will never reach, a street vehicle without a stock car’s capacities. No women’s records set here. Just Lee Breedlove, 1965, three hundred and eight miles per hour. Only occupying the flats on her husband’s orders to fend off his competitor. Rhiannon wants to try regardless. Wants to show her mother. Wants to think of nothing, wants to blast her brain apart with speed. Wants to feel her automobile gunning across salt, wants to feel the engine rattling and reaching its limit at last.

  Billie says nothing as Rhiannon decelerates and pulls off the interstate to the eastern edge of the Salt Flats. The season just readying to begin, no crowds or cars in sight. Where Rhiannon knows NASCAR stock cars and piston engines and rockets have made their way across the past century to break barriers of sound and speed, racing season July through October, the flats at their hardest and driest. She pulls into a sand-scattered parking lot bereft of vehicles, a wooden Bureau of Land Management sign the only occupant: BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY. Beyond the sign spans a wide bed of dry salt and cracked blue, as if they’ve parked on the beach of a seashore. This place nothing like the Chicagoland Speedway or the Colorado National Speedway or any other track Rhiannon has ever raced, deep grooves cracked through the salt like reptilian patches of dinosaur skin. Rhiannon blinks back the blank notebook paper, the lack of any last coordinate. She shifts the car into park and leaves the engine idling, bands of the day’s last light breaking across the low mountains beyond the windshield.

  She glances at Billie. Get out.

  The first words she’s spoken since they left Salt Lake City.

  Billie doesn’t look at her. I know what you’re doing.

  I don’t care what you know.

  I’m not moving. I’m coming with you.

  No, you’re not. Get out.

  Why should I?

  Because I don’t want you hurt. You have no health insurance. It’s not the kind of liability I need. You already took the goddamn car, Billie. Just give me this. Just let me do this on my own.r />
  Rhiannon’s hands clench the steering wheel. The engine hums through the dashboard. Billie watches the spanned fields of white salt.

  I don’t want you to do anything stupid.

  What, like you? Like stealing a car? Like scattering an urn across a fucking cliff? It’s my turn. I haven’t done anything stupid in six years.

  Rhiannon looks at her sister. Her head half shaved. Her limbs so much skinnier, her left arm rippling down in wound-hardened waves. Rhiannon’s assumed always that they’re nothing alike, that they could’ve been born to different parents, but in the car beneath the fading sun Rhiannon takes in Billie’s short-sloped nose, the same as hers. The same dimpled cheeks catching Utah’s setting sky. The same chestnut eyes, same dark hair despite so many years of Billie dyeing it anything but its natural color, anything to separate her from everyone in their family. Billie keeps her eyes forward. The engine drones and Rhiannon wonders if they’ll sit in the car forever. But Billie nods. Almost imperceptible. Grabs her daypack and slips out the passenger door.

  Rhiannon watches in the rearview mirror as Billie walks across the parking lot and stands in the distance, her hands shielding her eyes. The cabin silent. Radio off. No news. Rhiannon tests the gas pedal, the car idling. Watches the tachometer spike. A speed race: what she hasn’t done since she spun out on the racetrack in Indianapolis. The Mustang always only possibility, only knowing what a car could do without testing its limits. V-8 engine. Eight cylinders. Zero to sixty in four seconds, zero to one hundred in ten. Intake and exhaust valves and camshafts designed for maximum lift. Four hundred thirty-five horsepower. Four hundred pounds of torque. A six-speed manual override from the automatic Rhiannon’s used across six states of highways. And speed: Rhiannon knows the Mustang can top out at 164 miles per hour. Nothing to a stock car. Nothing to a 512 mile-per-hour land-speed record, but something. The sun knifes down the horizon and breaks into shards across the jagged graph of the mountains. Rhiannon knows she needs a permit, the Salt Flats operating under BLM land requirements. But she knows the land as desolate. Two minutes, tops.