She didn’t feel like doing any of those things.
She considered the dark outside and registered her fear. How very different life was without bright lights. She thought of the streetlights of her neighborhood in Chicago, evenly spaced, and the glow of light from the city itself in the distance. Although she found the light and noises of the city a constant low-grade annoyance, this silence-except-for-wind was weirdly annoying too. She hadn’t realized silence could be so loud that it zinged your eardrums. And suddenly it was all very spooky—she had to admit it. No one knew where she was except Kit, and maybe he was not a nice man after all.
“Ammalie,” she heard herself whispering, “I know you want to be a brave explorer, but this is stupid, this just isn’t gonna work.”
She fell asleep and dreamed of the restaurant. Of teaching another server, which she had done countless times. In her dream, she told the woman all the waitressing wisdoms: the side work of busing tables, rolling utensils. How the kitchen was loud, so when you said something, the cooks had to reply “Heard.” How when you went around a corner you said “Corner” and when you were behind someone you said “Behind.” How “open counts” were the number of people with menus open, how you might walk around and tell the kitchen staff that there were “sixteen open” and they’d reply “Heard.” How big round plates were called “rounds” and French onion soup was referred to as “fo.” She spoke of the need for efficiency. Speed.
At first light, she woke to the dream, and her hand was on her scar on her right temple—the result of a tray tipping, her losing balance, a broken wineglass hitting her head as she hit the floor, and a gash wide enough that even the good surgeon couldn’t quite make it invisible. No one had been at fault, not exactly, but it’s also true that perhaps she’d been moving too fast that day, and perhaps she’d been daydreaming or vaguely unhappy. In any case, now it felt like a marker of her work, her speed, her not really living her life, of being checked out and oblivious.
It marked something else—the moment she’d decided that getting a divorce was the sanest path possible. Her boss had driven her to the hospital; she’d called Mari to pick her up. She hadn’t called Vincent, since she knew he was at a Geography of the Midwest meeting, but more because she knew he would find her very request annoying, her interruption annoying, her very presence on the planet annoying. It didn’t even occur to her to call him, in fact. Comfort and help were to be found elsewhere. He had ceased to be interested in her life. And Mari was right—the only interest he did seem to have was in bossing her around, making small directorial comments about how she could do this or that better. The situation was not only bland, it was quietly toxic. A bloody head, and she’d not even considered calling her husband. That was revealing. And she knew then that if she let it continue, she would be to blame.
CHAPTER 10
Her mouth was tangy, her hair a tangle, her teeth filmy, her brain fuzzy and unrested. Oh, how fast the feral descends. She sat up slowly, sipped at water. Lady sat up too, and whined a sad whimper, as if telling Ammalie that she too saw the problem here.
Now the trailer was surprisingly hot, too hot. In her drunken blur, she’d turned the heater to high at midnight, which was insanely stupid, given the limited propane. She struggled out of Fluffiest Red—lordy, she was going to suffocate—turned off the heat, and opened the door for a breeze and to let Lady out. No sign of Kit. Just the Grey Goose, sitting there valiantly, frosted. Chilly air rushed in, and she went from being too hot to too cold almost immediately. She closed the door and pulled on long underwear and bundled up.
She’d make up for her Lazy Living—drinking too much, pouting—by doing something spectacular. She dully gathered her items: backpack, water, Travel Pouchy, first aid kit, a cheese sandwich, a container of dog food. She’d go as far as she could in one day—perhaps ten miles. Just to push herself. Just to see if she could do it. She would no longer feel squishy and sad, inside or out. One hike, and then she’d leave. Move on to someplace new. Where? She did not know. Hence the hike. It would give her time to think.
Should she text Mari the coordinates? Should she leave a note?
Just, go. Get going, you. big. baby. She had Lady. She had food and water. She had a plan. Shackleton didn’t text people. She had a coat and hat and gloves and food. Self-reliance was a lost art.
She headed first to the rock outcrops where she’d last seen Kit near the rutted dirt road. There were footprints in the sand, to be sure, and the firepit, and a small cave she’d not seen before, where, she supposed, a cooler could be placed and kept in the shade. But there was no sign of a cooler or anything else. No sign of camping. Nothing being built. She kicked at the dirt, wondering what he had meant about monkey-wrenching. Like, putting sugar in a politician’s gas tank? Like, blowing up a switching station at a gas rig? Like, sending some evil substance to an Exxon official who was burning up the Amazon jungle? Like, blowing up part of the Nestlé plant that was pumping water from an aquifer for stupid plastic bottled water near the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado, which he’d told her about? Suddenly the possibilities seemed endless, and she had to admit, she approved of nearly all of them.
She needed to forget about Kit, she needed to forget about Levi, she needed to stop wondering about Dan’s intent, she needed to stop hoping for love, she needed to stop navigating her life around men, she needed to change her brain. She needed to be a strong solo explorer. She hefted her backpack to her shoulders and set off to the south, breath misting from both her and Lady’s mouths. She knew this was called Bootheel country, and it did feel like a bootheel; rather, her soul felt trampled like a bootheel. She had to step between barbed wire twice—surely she was trespassing on private land, but no one was in sight. She moved up what looked like a deer path, which reminded her of what the thief in Colorado had said—that roads were built on animal paths, that they had a wisdom about the best way across valley or slope.
She hiked on and paused, suddenly aware of how easy it would be to get lost. Okay, she had to be smart here. She took small bits of twine from her backpack and tied them to trees, snapped photos of the landscape around her. She could still see Dart, could also see how it was positioned in the long flat valley, a solitary dot in a huge landscape.
After an hour, the land began to incline more fully with rock outcroppings and more trees. Her legs pushed her up; her head was clearing and she wasn’t out of breath and she felt strong and capable. Despite drinking too much and her mushy soul, she was in better shape than she’d been for…well, a decade, at least. She stopped to get her bearings often—the bluff to the south, the distant peaks to the west, the location of the sun, and petted Lady, who was trotting happily beside her, darting off occasionally to smell something but always coming back.
She stopped under a paloverde tree so they could both eat lunch, and she estimated she’d been hiking for a little over two hours with a few breaks, so perhaps had gone five or six miles, and now she’d have to double back, which scared her a little. Why’d she come so far? Well, nothing like putting oneself into a situation to force a push into new territory!
The sheer expanse was the stunner here—the land stretched so far that she felt she could even sense the curve of the earth. That, and the solitude. She was truly alone, and the hairs on the back of her neck pricked, even with Lady panting nearby. Planet of the Apes, that’s what it felt like. But it had been invigorating—and she’d not been too cold, nor was it windy. The air was crisp, her cheeks pleasantly chilled, her lungs and heart and leg muscles strong. She was alive.
She closed her eyes and tried to feel the place, the joy of the place, to practice her gratitudes for sitting here. It didn’t matter that Vincent would love it, or that Powell should someday see it, or that Apricot would never bother to even wonder about it, or that she’d tell Mari about it. It didn’t matter that Levi or Dan or Kit should see her out here. It was just her. Ammalie. She was the one whose eyes sought out the cactus wren on the cholla, she was the one who sensed that the air was cooler in the draw where a creek normally ran, and she was the one who could smell the sunlight in the sunny patches. She tapped her hiking boots on the ground. She meditated on her feet, about how they connected her to the planet, about all the steps they had ever taken for her.
As she chewed her apple, she felt too the expanse of time, and tried to recall the history of this general area—Cochise, the great chief, and the Hohokam people, how this land had been taken, stolen, from them, violently. She remembered something about Pancho Villa and Geronimo, but she thought too of the women, the untold-of, unsung, strong, and kind women. She could also understand why so many people came here for vision quests or mystical experiences. She could feel how magical this place was—Chihuahuan Desert to the east, the Sonoran Desert to the west, the Rocky Mountains to the north, and the Sierra Madre to the south. The place had a vibe, a storied history, a crazy topography. It was a place of interest, as the placard had declared, and her getting here made her a person of interest.
As she gathered up her supplies to head home, a texture caught her eye. Smooth human-made something under a nearby tree—something out of place. She approached carefully: It was a filthy olive-green plastic storage tub, similar to the one she kept her food in, but much older and battered, upside-down with a very large rock on top of it. It was alongside an animal trail in a wash. She looked around for a minute and then walked right up to the tub. On it were words, scrawled in black marker and sloppy handwriting: Go in Peace, Traveler. Paz.
She took off the rock—heavy and nearly all she could manage—and lifted the tub. There were three dusty gallon jugs of water and two very rusted cans of beans titrated tightly together. She considered it for some time, was aware of how slowly her mind was working. Ah, for migrants, for those who were walking up from the Mexico border. Two of the gallons had writing on them. One had a peace sign and the other said Aqua Pura.
Huh. Someone bringing water. To keep someone alive. Exactly what she’d done, only this water was useful.
She put the tub back, adding the freeze-dried snacks she had in her pack, put the rock back on top, and turned around, retracing her steps, feeling surprised. Surprised that a water drop would be this far north. Was that normal, to have water drops here? Also, perhaps she was less alone than she thought. There were people wanting to be unseen everywhere. Her bitterness about middle-age-woman-unseenness suddenly felt deeply, deeply silly and petty—here she was, moaning about growing older, being alone, being without a job, sad about dumb things like her eyesight deteriorating and the necessity of five different kinds of eyeglasses, but who had the capacity to get all those glasses, and all this while someone else was wanting to be invisible to survive. To live!
No more of this, she thought. No more of this whining. You’re embarrassing even me. How lucky you are. Not another word of whining. Then she glanced at the angle of the sun and figured she’d better pick up the pace. Tiny rocks under her feet rolled like BBs and she had just enough time to glance down at them with curiosity when her right foot started to slide, her body tilted backward, instinctually tried to correct itself and lean forward, and then, horribly, she felt the pebbles under her left foot give. Air. Ooof. She was aware of her feet floating in air, time speeding up, her ass hitting hard ground, a zing in her tailbone, and a twist sending her sideways into a long-fallen branch and the rock beneath it. A moment of quiet. Of startle. Of Lady’s whine. Of the sound of pebbles still rolling downhill. Then the pain hit.
She sat up and covered her mouth with her palm to hold in the moan and rising vomit, then moved those fingers to her temple. They came away bloody. “Oh, okay, no thanks,” she said to them. “Oh, fuck.” And to Lady, she said, “It’s okay, girl, it’s okay,” because Lady was trotting around her, whining.
Awe. That was her main emotion. Awe that life was so predictable. She had forecast such a thing when packing the first aid kit, and such a thing had happened.
Then, more pain. In her tailbone and in her head. Lady whined; she whined. She put her hand back up to her head and looked. A palmful of blood. Head wounds just bled a lot, right? But warm sticky ooze was seeping down her cheek and neck and she looked down and pulled her shirt away to find a thin stream already between her breasts. It had all happened so fast.
Stay calm. Ammalie, stay calm.
My head feels torn.
Stay calm.
With shaking hands, she got out her first aid kit and unwound the long piece of white bedsheet she’d rolled long ago. Breathed in, breathed out. Put a thick piece of gauze and applied pressure to the wound. Flung it to the side when it was pure red, then put new gauze on, held it tight as she quickly wrapped the bandage around her head. Over this she put her baseball cap, in order to hold it all tightly to her head, though there was a piercing pain, and her teeth were chattering now, and not from the cold.
She rinsed the blood from her hands with water from one of her bottles, made sure to drink the rest of it as she swallowed two ibuprofen. Her hands were still sticky, especially in between her fingers, but she didn’t want to waste more water. She sat there until she felt she was okay, and then stood slowly. It was fine. The world wasn’t wobbly, though there was a stinging burn and an ache in her head, two separate sensations.
“Ut-oh,” she said to Lady. “Ut-oh ut-oh ut-oh.”
She turned and stumbled down the path, in the direction of Dart. Her heart throbbed along with her head.
Think, Ammalie. It had taken her a few hours to get here, and then she’d paused, and if it took her a few hours to get back, she’d make it in daylight. Barely. But if she had to stop and rest, then it would get colder and dark, and although she had a headlamp, the idea of tripping or stepping on cactus or animals…oh, god, there were bears and jaguars. She tried to pick up her pace, but she stumbled, and slowed.
Slow, Ammalie, slow.
Her brain whirred and blurred. She felt high again—were the edibles kicking in now? She touched her greenstone necklace and the key that hung next to it. She hummed a song. Some creature moved in the bush beside her and her yelp sent her head into a new level of thrumming.
“Oh my god,” she mumbled to Lady, trotting alongside her and also looking tired. “Oh, god. What have I done? I need…help. I’m so stupid, I’m so fucked!”
Against all odds of the universe, a calm, quiet voice responded. A voice that was not her voice, but more like an echo of a voice, as if coming from a different plane of existence, as if coming from others who had been here. Keep going.
