Oh, god, she was going crazy. She was high! She touched her ears, as if they were the problem. Auditory hallucinations. She’d heard of such a thing. The pot…the loss of blood…the loneliness…she really had broken. Into shards! She didn’t realize how many breaks there could be! No one had ever bothered to tell her that when you thought you’d hit rock bottom, there were way more bottoms to go!
She sat down and started weeping, hiccupping and wiping snot on her sleeve. She was woozy, then nauseous, then trembling from cold and fear, then woozy again. She’d bled through her tampon and pad and could feel warm wet turning cold in her crotch, where there was also cold pee, and so she struggled with her pants and her backpack and supplies and managed to deal with all that, and then rested again. Now her head was bleeding through the bandage. Her tailbone zinged wildly from her fall. Her head felt like a balloon about to burst.
A contorted ironwood tree next to a dilapidated barbed-wire fence was nearby; she got up and stumbled over to it, sat on a rock at its base, heard herself whimper. If she had been hiking with someone, this would be so different.
She wanted one of her three keys.
She wanted to go back in time.
She wanted to do things differently.
Head resting on the tree, she could gaze at the sky. Now the sun was tilting to the horizon and the temperature was dropping. Though it was still light out, the moon was up and visible and something was fluttering above—bats, she realized. She murmured the children’s poem while staring at the first stars and applying pressure to her head by pressing her palm into it. If she could just quit resisting this…If she could just accept this place, and the night, and the unexpected situation…She had some sense that this was not her plan, but it was okay…If she could just rest. She was cold. She pulled Lady to her and hugged her, and Lady stayed still, quietly panting.
Some part of her brain told her to move, and another part told her to stay. As ever, two opposing truths existed at once. Get up. Move on. Onward. Rest, rest, you need rest. Some indeterminate amount of time went by, and then she heard Lady woof.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a figure, and oh, fuck, she was hallucinating or had a concussion.
“Hey, Kat.” His voice was low and full of concern.
“Kit?”
She reached out and poked him hard in the stomach to see if he was real. He gently held her hand. “Where’d you come from? What are you doing out here, Kat?”
“I was on a hike. I fell.”
He was on one knee in front of her, holding her hand, then shining a light into her pupils and putting his hands on her neck. “I’ve been watching you for a bit…hoping you’d make it on your own, I guess. You seemed to be doing okay until now.” He sighed. “Debating. My life or yours?”
“Why is it one or the other? Why’d you leave?” Her voice was whiny.
“Can you walk? It’s getting colder. Push on. Like Shackleton, eh? You can do it.”
He reached out to pull her up, and they took some small steps. He had a backpack on, a cooler in one hand, a nearly empty gallon jug of water in the other, but he set the water down and abandoned it so that he could use one arm to prop her up. In the other hand, he held her backpack. For a long time, they shuffled in silence, and she found herself counting things in three to the fall of a footstep.
Step—by step—by step.
Key—by key—by key.
Pow-ell, Mar-i, Apri-cot.
Step—by step—by step.
One—and two—and three.
As they stumbled on, Lady trotting by their side, her mind loopily thought back to the vague time after Vincent’s death, the way so many people had commented on how well she was doing, but how one co-worker had asked bluntly if she’d encountered a Dark Night of the Soul, to which she’d shrugged and wondered What does that even mean? She understood it now. And she was in it. Her dark night was actually in a dark night, and no, she was not okay.
As if in response to this thought, Kit said, “Hang in there. Talk to me. You doing okay?”
“Ah, that’s why I did this trip,” she murmured by way of answer. She halted and pointed up at the Milky Way, at the swan, Albireo. Now she knew: Because she and Vincent had connected when they traveled, and in order to truly let him go, she needed to feel connected to the best moments with him, so as to really tell him and her guilt goodbye. It was the better way to go. To consider the best moments, not the bitter ones. But simultaneously, she needed travel to connect with her own independent self, to say hello to herself, the most genuine version of herself. She said, “To break into other people’s lives until I found mine.”
“Okay, cool,” he whispered back.
“And it’s easier because I’m white. We’re white. Do you know what that gives us?”
She could feel him pause, then nod.
She started to cry. “I haven’t had to walk across deserts. Or worry when police pulled me over. And you haven’t either. To inhabit my true self, I need to recognize these things. I’ve been breaking into homes. I need one person on the planet to know that I’m doing this illegal thing. And you’re it. And I need someone to know that I was trying to be courageous, but also, I was always taking so much for granted.”
She thought he’d object or wave away her comment, but he did not. He was nodding, murmuring, Right on, lady. Cool, cool. Keep walking, friend.
—
Dart and the Grey Goose reflected in the moonlight like a lighthouse, an odd beacon of light in the desert. The hoots of the owls and the sounds of coyotes no longer startled or scared her—her nervous system was overloaded—and Kit and Lady were with her. She was shaking hard now, though, and Kit had his arm around her waist, both propping her up and trying to keep her warm. He’d put his winter cap on her head, and his jacket on her shoulders, though she didn’t quite remember when that had happened.
Her mind floated. To big things, important things, things to distract her from the pain. Like, she hadn’t cared so much about the United States–Mexico border situation—the proximity principle and all. Chicago was so far away. She wondered how humans could better tune in to issues beyond their purview? And do more about the things they clearly saw? Like, children in schools being shot. Like the destruction of the planet. Like the rights of women fading away.
She needed to go someplace other than her hurting body. Than this cold night. So she also touched the greenstone necklace for comfort. Vincent’s engagement ring, of sorts. He’d bought it from a Māori co-worker in New Zealand, whose father made them. Next to it, he had put a thick, small key, which he’d said he found on the property he was living on, and that he found particularly beautiful, but that since it didn’t fit anything, he’d…well, taken it. He thought it was as pretty as the stone itself—after all, an old key was a piece of art.
But the greenstone and key were more than an engagement ring. They were also meant to mark the loss of their baby. Though being on birth control, she’d gotten pregnant on one of their early dates, and before she knew of the pregnancy, he’d left for New Zealand on a long-planned trip. She’d emailed him—one of the first emails of her life, this being in the ’80s—and told him of the pregnancy, unsure whether to get an abortion or not. He confessed to having a lover there and being unsure himself, and both agreed it had been just a fling, and yet, now there was this…situation. A baby.
She’d waited for her brain to decide—and then nature decided for her. Right at the two-month mark, she miscarried, which was a relief and extraordinarily physically painful and somehow very, very sad. Contradictory strong emotions blasting her all at once. She was twenty-two at the time, alone, in college, with a dead father and a mother she wasn’t very close to, so when Vincent arrived with a proposal and a necklace, she said yes. When she told him there was no baby, he proposed again, and again she said yes. And she’d worn it since, touching it whenever she needed it, such as now. Because even if love had dissipated, and even if the commitment to marriage had perhaps been born of fear more than true connection, it all had originally felt so hopeful and real.
She thought, I want to love again. I want to hope again.
She thought, I want the world to be better for everyone, for women and children, for people of all countries, I want better solutions.
She thought she heard a voice from the dark, a whisper. “Just do something. Any good thing. Keep going.”
—
