My mind followed the crack in the ceiling north and east into Wyoming, up the Sweetgrass River, down the Platte past my grandmother Hansen's place near Casper, and along the Front Range to Chugwater, to my parents' ranch. We had been a family, hadn't we? But a family that needed the wide expanses of the short-grass prairie to get along even as poorly as we did. My parents had gotten on best when Dad was way out in the farthest paddock, miles from the house, mending fence, and Mother was on the couch in one of her silk robes, sleeping off the excesses of another hair of the dog that had bitten her the night before. And where was I? Hiding in the barn, or out talking to the grasshoppers that dined on the forage we needed for the cattle. They never answered, just hopped away, green and yellow speedsters who didn't need words.
The few times I saw my mother and father walk out together across the ranch, he'd be looking outward across the sage brush, checking the grasses, watching for coyotes, and she would look inward, back through the early death of their son and into the loss of her own frail sense of belonging back East, where she had lived as a girl.
She had looked westward after college, thinking it would save her. He had married East, enthralled by the stiff presumptions of a culture that could measure itself back farther than a hundred years. Adventure can die a sad death if the heart is not strong enough.
And I had risen from that ground propelled only by a longing to reach for the sun. Our family had died. Like the adobe soil we tried to tame, it had crumbled, frozen by too many harsh winters, baked every summer under a pitiless sun, chewed at by the wind, and beaten under the hooves of a hundred thousand witless animals driven to the slaughter for too few dollars.
I closed my eyes, my mind going empty from the cold blast of memory. How I longed to be part of a family, and not just a small collection of hard-bitten individuals who couldn't bear each others' pain. I wanted smiles on arrival, tears on farewell, laughter at the tales of my adventures, joy in my accomplishments, a man to embrace in the dark warmth of sleeping, and, if I could believe the tingling that had been set off by Faye's early morning surprise, I wanted children. I wanted to look into their eyes, stroke their hair, and teach them what they needed to know to find more love than hatred, just as soon as I learned it myself.
Six months earlier, Ray had asked me to marry him, thinking I would convert to Mormonism and become part of his life. I'd said maybe to the marriage part of the idea, but made it pretty clear that I never had, and could see no reason I ever would have, any interest in joining his religion. It just wasn't me, and I'm a person who doesn't do things for show. But thinking I could meet him halfway, I had moved to Salt Lake City a month later, right in the middle of the summer heat. We had managed to get through the frivolities of Labor Day weekend, the circus atmosphere of family birthdays, and the observance of perhaps half a dozen Family Home Evenings (the weekly Mormon home study and prayer gathering; I'd gotten out of the rest because he was on shift for six others, and I was ⦠otherwise engaged). And I had finessed the secular holiday of Thanksgiving by thinking up a reason I needed to run up to Wyoming to see an uncle. But then came Christmas. Christmas is the ultimate in family holidays, a bucketful of joy if you have an ecstatically wonderful, supportive, loving family, stressful at best if you're in the other
99 percent of reality. On Christmas, the rivets in our relationship had begun to pop.
On that date, it became clear that I was not only ignorant of the all-important family traditions but also congenitally bereft of any talent for adapting to them. I showed up in slacks, only to find Ava and all Ray's sisters in floor-length dresses and tinselly hair ribbons. I presented a little prepackaged assortment of dried fruits and nuts as the sisters proffered artistic basketfuls of home-baked goodies dripping in chocolate, the Mormon cheat street into the pleasure of caffeine. I sat mute and unmusical as everyone crowded around the piano to sing carols. I was relegated to setting the table while the brothers-in-law played with the children and Ava and her daughters laughed in the kitchen. I lifted my fork before all the prayers were said at dinner, screwed up and asked for coffee with desert, and longed for a good old cowboy shot of schnapps to calm my nerves as we cleared the special Christmas dishes and I dropped one. And all eyes focused on Ray and me as we opened each other's gifts.
I had bought Ray a ski sweater in the exact shade of indigo that flashed from his wonderful eyes. He loved downhill skiing, so I thought this might be a suitable peace offering, since I had screwed up a month earlier by admitting that I much preferred the solitude of cross-country skiing, could barely stay upright on downhill skis, and detested the congestion and high-priced show of ski resorts.
Ray had smiled politely at the sweater and awarded me a chaste peck on the cheek. His mother had made a study of an object on the other side of the room. As he handed me his gift, his sisters' postures had shifted, their heads swiveling like so many radar dishes, tracking the package, measuring it, burning holes through the paper with X-ray vision, their eyes widening and contracting as they noted that it was a big package, not a small one. Not a ring. Little smiles flickered across certain faces. I avoided Ava's eyes but stared down each sister in turn, unable to hold my
defiance in check any longer. I wanted to say,
He offered me the ring last summer and I said not yet,
but such candor was inappropriate, then and perhaps forever. Reining in my anger as best I could, I managed to smile as I yanked the ribbon off the box, tore off the paper, slid it open, and saw ⦠a ski sweater. A vivid, rose pink, soft, fuzzy ski sweater. Ray patted my walking cast and said, “This comes with ski lessons.” I said, “Thank you” and “I love it,” then returned the peck of a kiss to his handsome cheek. With stiffened fingers, I touched the mass of pink fuzz, pretending to admire its softness, but I could see only how sallow my hand looked against the color. As I set the box aside, Ray's sister Katie managed to catch my eye. Katie is the number two sister, about twenty-five years old and already the mother of three. She looked smug. “See, I told you she'd like it, Ray. You just leave that shopping to me,” she purred, grandstanding her prior knowledge, her complicity. I spent the next hour trying to imagine a way to rip the putrid pink mass into strips and knot it into a vengeful noose. I even picked out a beam from which to hang a rope that I could loop around Katie's deceitful neck, and imagined her kicking as she swung. It was a long, bitter afternoon, during which I reproved myself continually for my paranoia and inability to let things roll off my back.
Extracting myself once again from the delicacies of this fantasy and touching down briefly in the present moment, I found a new crack on the ceiling of my bedroom, this room that Ray had never entered. Had this new rift been there the day before? Had the earthquake caused it?
Suddenly, I could no longer stand to be alone.
I jumped up and threw the UGS materials and my freshman physical geology textbook into a backpack along with a sandwich and a bottle of water, put on some hiking boots (I was beginning to feel self-conscious about the red ropers), and then headed out to the street where I'd left Faye's car. I was soon once again hammering all that horsepower up the hill toward her house. She
would understand. She would help me through the coming hours. And she had many more immediate worries under whose weight I could bury my fears.
This time as I ascended toward her house, I took much greater interest in the surrounding topography. Surprising how much more menacing those boulders on the rampart above the development looked now that I could no longer assume that the developer had done his geologic hazards homework. Was that slope sufficiently stable to ride out a truly big earthquake, or perhaps even a springtime mudslide?
I was so involved with reading the landscape that I zipped right past the place where my truck had died without noticing that it was gone. Or perhaps it was a combination of the landscape and my need to be in the comfort of my friend's company. Or just call it denial.
And Faye was not home.
I stared numbly at her front door. If she wasn't there, then I urgently needed something to do. I remembered the maps and books. I pulled the backpack out of the Porsche and headed up the road.
It was only a short distance to the foot of the rock-strewn slope above. At the end of the pavement, I passed a parked pickup truck bearing official state of Utah plates and stepped onto a path that led into the “open-space corridor,” that steepening slope I hoped the city or county officials had deemed unsuitable for building.
The ground rose steeply into arid scrub land as I followed the zigzagging trail, noting the sizes of boot and dog prints that had become implanted after the several cycles of freezing and thawing that had visited the area since the last snowfall. Something in me soon found this concentration of so many people's journeys annoying, even intolerable, and I stepped off the path, crunching through the crust of old com snow. I stomped straight up the slope, dodging only as I reached the more sizable rocks or arrays
of stunted oaks. I marched resolutely toward the biggest boulder in the neighborhood, a slab of sandstone the size of a small truck, figuring I'd sit on it and read. It lay at the edge of a great train of boulders that filled the slope immediately below the mouth of a narrow canyon above.
Somewhere in there, I realized that I was following tracks left very recently by another adult human. The afternoon sunlight glinted in gemstone flashes off the snow, an array of whiteness rhythmically disrupted by the blue shadows that filled the shallow boot prints. Laid over the icy crust of the snow were small sprays of older, more powdery snow that the boot-owner's strides had brought up from underneath.
I decided the footprints belonged to whoever had parked the pickup truck at the end of the pavement below.
It was not long before I caught up with a man about my age, who was dressed much as I was: blue jeans, hiking boots, and a down parka. He had heavy shoulders and a wide face to go with them. His nose was broad and rounded, terminating neatly over a thick beard that curled away from his cheeks. Together with his high, boxy cheekbones, the combination of nose and beard gave him the air of a kindly lion I remembered from a picture book I had had as a child. He was leaning jauntily against one of the boulders, making notes on pages fastened to an aluminum clipboard. His jacket was open down the front, exposing a plaid wool shirt and a telltale cord that led down inside his shirt toward a small round bump about an inch thick in the middle of his chest.
“Doing some geology?” I asked pleasantly.
He looked up abruptly, feigned surprise, and then set to examining himself as if he were covered with some odd substance. “Does it show, really? I mean, I can never understand how people guess so easily,” he replied, in a perfect deadpan. Then he gave me a sly grin.
I smiled back. “It's the hand lens around your neck, the basic
pragmatism of the attire, the âI set my own fashion' beard, the chapped hands, the stoical use of a metal clipboard even on a cold day, the ease with which you sit on a nice hard rock. More comfortable here than on an office chair, your posture suggests. Add to that the pickup truck down the hill, the fact that I'm finding you out on a potentially unstable slope the afternoon after an earthquake, andâ”
He held up a hand. “That'll do. But tell me how do you know these things, O ye who climbed out of a Porsche even though you look like you'd be more at home on a horse.”
I grabbed the side seams of my jeans and dropped a prim curtsy. “Because I also am a geologist.”
He somberly put his lips together and whistled the tune that goes to the words, “You can see by my outfit that I am a cowboy.”
Smiling at his musical quip, I acknowledged the rest of his observation. “And yes, I've done my time on horseback. The fancy car belongs to the friend who also belongs to the house. My pickup truck fell on its sword this morning as I was driving up here to check on my Porschely friend, who was not as sanguine about the trembling of terra firma as I.”
The man nodded. “Ah. Yours was the twenty-year-old beige half-ton getting towed.”
I winced, then looked down the hill toward where it should have been. “I guess some chichi neighbor reported it abandoned,” I muttered. “A towing bill. That's all I need.”
“Imperialist swines. Need some help?”
I let out a long sigh. “No. I guess there's really nothing that can be done.”
“A venerable beast,” he said sympathetically.
“Just getting broken in. A mere pup.”
The man pulled his cap off and held it briefly to his chest, put it back on his head, then hopped off his rock and presented me with a hand to be shaken. “Logan de Pontier.”
“Em Hansen.”
His hand was surprisingly warm, considering his lack of gloves and the metal clipboard he'd been handling. His beard was clipped closer than the slightly wild hair that curled over the back of his collar, and his eyes were bright green and wide-set, giving his leonine face a mystic, walleyed look. There was something disquieting about standing so close to him that I could see the subtleties in the color of those eyes. I withdrew my hand and used it it to gesture at the slope.