by Zoje Stage
“As long as he kept our hands in front.”
“The second you two headed off we grabbed our shards and started slicing.”
“It was a long shot, weren’t sure they’d be sharp enough. But the rope was thin. You really didn’t have any idea?” Beck asked again. “You went out there…”
“I just…I was prepared. Knew I’d have my moment.”
Slowly, Beck and Tilda nodded, their gazes dawning with awe. And respect. And if Imogen saw in them a little uncertainty, too, a little fear, well, even she hadn’t known the extent of her own power.
“What now?” Imogen asked.
“Spend the night here,” said Beck. “Tomorrow we’ll walk to Hermit for our last night, and leave right on schedule.”
“Wow.” Right on schedule. A surreal conclusion to a surreal week.
“We can’t get out tomorrow? Hike it in one day?” Tilda asked.
“It’s too far,” said Beck. “It’s not practical to push ourselves, and with our injuries we should be cautious. I’m just glad Afiya won’t have any reason to worry.”
While they’d been plunged in a nightmare, time had kept its steady rhythm. No one knew what they’d been enduring. Imogen found something reassuring in that; everyone they knew had gone about their lives, with Imogen, Tilda, and Beck probably far from their thoughts. Out of sight, and out of mind.
“Everyone else is fine,” Imogen said contemplatively. “Like nothing ever happened.”
Beck exhaled through her nose and Imogen saw her thinking of her unborn child, of the family they were still going to be.
43
They ate Cup Noodles and crackers for supper, and Beck mixed up a batch of instant pudding for dessert. It was runny and lumpy, but chocolatey in the best way. Imogen knew they were low on freeze-dried dinners, but instead of using the dead man’s food, Beck had made them a meal heavy on carbs and comfort. It was just what they needed.
They’d entered a place where the shared experience made conversation unnecessary; this was how soldiers bonded for life. There was a lot to think about. They needed to nudge parts of themselves aside to make room for a new kind of existence. It would take time. But in the meanwhile, some things needed to be discussed. Imogen was hesitant to tell them what she’d been contemplating, afraid they would be dismissive or critical, but she had to try.
“I’d like…” Her words broke a spell. They looked up from their spoons. “I’d like to not tell anyone. What happened here.”
A seriousness descended like a curtain on Beck’s face and Imogen knew she was weighing the ramifications of their silence.
“Why?” Tilda asked. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It’s not that.”
“What about the other man?” Beck asked. Because of course she’d found the most ethically problematic complication: not alerting the authorities—or the man’s family—to his whereabouts.
“I was thinking…Maybe we could leave something, plant something of his, just outside the tunnel. To help them find him. Once it’s known he’s missing, hopefully soon, they’ll be searching and when they spot it they’ll look in the tunnel.”
Beck considered that. “Maybe his permit.” She got up and crossed to his backpack, untwisted the wire that attached his permit to a zipper. She scanned the info as she sat back down. “He was heading straight out to Slate. Planned to spend a couple nights. That’s better.”
“Than what?” Tilda asked.
“Than if he’d planned to stay at Boucher—how could we not have seen him then? But if we’d been at the river, or day hiking, we legit might not have seen him pass through Boucher.”
“But he didn’t pass through,” said Tilda. “He didn’t even get across the camping area.”
“But how would we know that, if we weren’t there all day?” Beck was building an easy case for plausible deniability.
“They may ask us, at some point,” Imogen had to concede.
“They’ll contact me first,” Beck said. “I registered our permit. But yes, we should be prepared. Are you comfortable saying you didn’t see anything?”
“We can say we were hardly at camp—which is true. Telling the truth is easier than lying,” Tilda said.
“Agreed. But…Imogen, have you thought this through? Remember last—” Beck didn’t say time, but Imogen knew that was the word she wanted. “It might have gone better then, if we’d told.”
Imogen shook her head. “Please. Please trust me. It’s not that I don’t want him to be found—I do. And I want him to have justice. It’s just, I don’t…I don’t want Gale to be found. And we can’t really report one without reporting both.”
“You saved us. They’re not going to blame you,” said Tilda. “You’re not going to be in trouble.”
“That’s not it.” It sounded like they might be willing to honor her request. But that could change when they heard the full reason. She took a deep breath before proceeding. “I want to give Gale his final wish. To disappear. He can disappear, if we don’t say anything.”
He wouldn’t want it, to be dragged out of the Canyon. Autopsied. Dissected. Put on display to be judged by the World Wide Web. And Imogen didn’t want that either, for herself.
“You don’t owe him anything,” Beck said, her brows pinched with concern.
“I know. But…if he escapes the end of his story, then we can escape it too.” She didn’t want to beg, but she prayed they would really hear her. “This will be attached to me—to us. Attached forever. It won’t matter that we were defending ourselves because what people will say is that we were terrorized, we were victims. They’ll choose all the words and decide who we are. And whatever else we do, for the rest of our lives—they’ll write it in our obituaries, that we were kidnapped by cop-killer whatever-his-full-name-was. And if we tell them everything then everyone will know. I won’t be me—no one will see the rest of me ever again. I’ll be That Author Who Killed Her Kidnapper.”
“It would be good press,” Tilda said with an impish grin. Then, more seriously, “No, I see what you’re saying.”
“I don’t want to be seen as a victim—or a killer. I don’t want these words attached to me. I want to leave this here. We didn’t do anything wrong…” She faltered, not entirely at ease with what she’d done. “I don’t want people to know my name, for this. He can disappear. We can be…who we are, on our own terms.”
Beck nodded. Tilda chewed her lip. “What about Gale’s body?”
“The vultures and ravens will be done with him in a matter of days,” said Beck. “Maybe no one will ever find him. Or someday, maybe they’ll find his bones.” Imogen glanced over at the dead man’s pack. They followed her gaze. “We’ll leave it near Gale. If he’s found, they’ll put two and two together and know he killed the backpacker, for his provisions.”
“So you’re okay with it?” Imogen asked.
“I am.” And Beck sounded certain. “I don’t want this attached to me—it would be worse than a ghost. We’ll leave it here.”
Imogen turned to Tilda. “What about you?”
“More than okay. It’s hard enough to have a public persona, trying to keep it grounded in reality—this would blow up my life. This is ours. What we endured. Whatever we feel…it might change over time, but we’ll have each other. We survived this. We should get to say who knows and who doesn’t.”
“What about telling our significant others?”
“Do you want to?” Tilda asked Beck.
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. Maybe I’d tell Afiya in some distant future. It would scare her now, even to see that I’m all right. I don’t want that kind of…fear, changing our relationship, setting boundaries. We’ll need to process this—us, the three of us—alone, and maybe together.”
Tilda and Imogen nodded.
“So we leave it here?” Imogen looked to both of them. “I know…we don’t know how it’ll manifest in our lives…but for now, for as long as we can? Between th
e three of us?”
“It’s ours. It belongs to the three of us.”
“Agreed,” said Beck.
44
What followed were unexpectedly peaceful hours. The trio marveled at the Milky Way as they lay in their sleeping bags. They awoke and were thankful that the night had been kind to them; they’d slept well. The redness and tingling in Tilda’s stung hand weren’t as bad. Beck’s knee was stiff when she first got up, but after walking around she declared it a bit improved. Her face was still a rainbow of sickly colors, but the swelling was receding. She planned to tell Afiya that she’d taken a careless tumble while rock-hopping across the creek. The slash in her arm, she’d say, was courtesy of the agave plant she’d landed on. Imogen’s injuries were mostly invisible, but she was hopeful they would heal better than her previous ones.
Before they left Slate, Beck went alone to where they’d abandoned Gale’s body. She disposed of his spear in a fissure between two boulders, and left the stranger’s pack nearby, stashed under some brush. Their intent was that his gear wouldn’t be spotted before Gale became skeletal remains, so no one could easily determine his cause of death. Let them think he died of stupidity, not a savage fight. Maybe they’d wonder if he’d had a fatal reaction to a snakebite, or died of an untreated infection; it wasn’t as if Gale would’ve sought help. Or maybe the Canyon would erase him, an irrelevant speck in a vast domain. The vultures, as Beck reported, were well on their way.
Imogen and Tilda never found Gale’s gun. Given the illusion of distance, and how hard it would be to tell one cluster of rocks from another, Imogen doubted if he ever would have recovered it.
They took only a short rest when they reached Boucher. Imogen secured the stranger’s backcountry permit to a twiggy bush near the entrance of the old mining tunnel. She wanted to affix it well enough that it wouldn’t blow away, while making it look as if it had simply gotten snagged there. Tilda crumpled it and tore it in half first, trying to create the impression that it had been ripped off. At the last minute, Imogen scrubbed both pieces with the hem of her shirt and smeared dirt on them to ruin their fingerprints. The authorities might look for Gale’s and it would be better to have no prints than the wrong ones.
“You watch too much TV,” Beck said to her for the third time that trip.
“Yup. It’s all research.” The task was serious but the mood was light; they all smiled. But Imogen knew she’d become a survivalist, willing—able—to do anything.
Their actions were disrupting the truth. But the dead were dead. Imogen, Beck, and Tilda would live with that truth forever, regardless of what anyone else knew. Or didn’t.
The walk all the way from Slate to Hermit was long. With rest breaks it took them almost seven hours, but they kept a meditative pace rather than a hurried one. At one point Imogen burst out laughing and they looked at her, expecting her to fill them in.
“Nothing. Inside joke,” she mumbled, unwilling to explain that the farther away they got from Slate, the more buoyed she felt. Fearless. Alive.
Periodically one of them would start singing and they’d all join in. It was a good day, a weird kind of good, but good.
As they were cleaning up after supper, Imogen crumpled the last chicken à la king package and stuffed it into their garbage bag—which had remained strapped to Beck’s pack during their entire misadventure. In the diminishing light, and completely by coincidence, she spotted among their trash…the missing Visine bottle. She fished it out, grinning. Some of her medical marijuana tincture still sloshed around inside. She slipped it into her hoodie’s kangaroo pocket and wandered off for a good-night pee.
When Imogen was safely where no one could see her, she did an unthinkable thing. Praying to the rocks and the ravens for their forgiveness, she threw the Visine bottle as far as she could. It might take a million years for the plastic to decompose, but she hoped the sun goddess and Canyon spirit would understand: some things had to be left behind. Imogen knew she couldn’t be her new self while carrying all the literal garbage of her past life.
It was their last night and again Beck and Tilda slept on either side of her. Though subtle about it, they seemed to have appointed themselves her bodyguards. Did they think she was going to fall apart? Or burst into nightmarish screams? It was sweet, if unnecessary—and a trifle funny when Imogen remembered how she’d once imagined herself as the weakling who would cower in their warrior shadows, tending to their weapons.
By the next day it was evident that they were all feeling an unburdened ease, a bolstered and triumphant energy. Even with Beck’s limp, it carried them fleet-footed up the difficult trail. They paused before the steepest sections to assess who most needed one of the two remaining walking sticks, and for short step-ups they shared, passing a stick down to the next person. As happens in the Canyon, after just a few days their muscles had been trained and their skills honed; even Tilda functioned with an assured competence now.
At Santa Maria Springs they took off their boots as they had on the way down, and refilled their warmed canteens with cooler water from the trough.
“Seven days,” Imogen said, wiggling her toes in a patch of sun.
That was all it had been, though time had stretched and spun and toyed with them like a cat with a mouse under its paw, indifferent to torturing a living thing until its heart gave out. They all felt the magnitude of those days. Tilda shut her eyes and tilted her face sunward. Beck looked toward the distant North Rim, hung like a picture in a frame of rock. They were both here, and there—that strange liminal zone that hovers between home and the journey, the journey and home. The present moment shared space with both past and future.
Soon they were back on the trail. Beck suggested taking another quick break when they reached the upper Hermit Basin and its little forest of juniper and pinyon pine, but instead they passed a canteen around and kept going. Their adventure was almost over; leaving had become a palpable thing, an invisible presence that hiked alongside them. For Imogen it was bittersweet. It certainly hadn’t been the trip they’d planned—something horrible had happened, almost beyond words. But in the Canyon, nothing was all horrible. The beauty, the holiness of this place was everywhere, it had never abandoned them. To recognize that now filled Imogen with a resurrecting surge of joy.
Beck’s Jeep was just as they’d left it. They shoved the packs in the back and it was only as they were clambering in that Imogen realized how dirty they all were.
“We’re gonna make a mess of your car.” Dusty red boot prints were already imprinted on the floor mats at Imogen’s feet.
“It’s just dirt,” said Beck.
How weird it felt to sit on a cushioned seat. To move without the effort of one’s own muscles. As Beck pulled out of the parking area she flicked on the radio, but after ten seconds of catastrophic news she shut it off.
Tilda, in the front passenger seat, plugged Beck’s phone into the charger. It had enough juice to turn on and, without comment or question, as soon as there was a strong enough signal she placed a call. She held the phone up, in speaker mode, and they all heard it ringing.
“Hello?” Afiya’s voice was a giant grin.
“Hey babe.” Beck fought back tears. “We’re coming home. We’ll be there soon.”
EPILOGUE
BACKPACKER IDENTIFIED
ARIZONA DAILY SUN (October 22, Flagstaff, AZ)
Local authorities have confirmed that the body found in an abandoned mining tunnel in a remote area of the Grand Canyon is that of missing Wisconsin backpacker Jeremy Haynes. Haynes, 39, an experienced solo hiker, was reported missing by a friend after Haynes failed to return home. Following a short search, Haynes’s body was discovered near the Boucher camping area, the apparent victim of a stabbing.
Authorities are investigating a link between Haynes’s murder and wanted fugitive Frederick Galen. Galen, 42, had recently been released on parole and has a long record of previous charges for burglary, fraud, aggravated assault, and armed robbery
. Just days before Haynes entered the Grand Canyon, Galen was pulled over by a Texas highway patrolman for a routine traffic violation, during which the patrolman was killed. Galen’s DNA was discovered at both crime scenes.
After law enforcement agencies reached out to all backcountry permit holders for Grand Canyon National Park for early-to-mid-October, separate sightings of both men were reported in and around the Hermit camp area. Haynes’s body was found several miles west, and there were no other reported sightings of either man. One theory suggests Galen may have entered the Grand Canyon in a desperate effort to avoid being apprehended, and may have killed the Wisconsin man for his supplies. None of Haynes’s backpacking equipment has been located.
The manhunt for Galen, who is now wanted in Texas for capital murder, is still active, though initial searches by air and on foot have yielded no further clues to his whereabouts. Due to the difficulty of the terrain, the National Park Service, in cooperation with multiple law enforcement agencies, is unsure how long it will commit manpower to ongoing backcountry searches. Galen, an inexperienced outdoorsman, is not believed to have left the Grand Canyon, nor has he contacted any members of his family. Officially he remains “at large.”
Imogen had been tempted to frame the article when it came out the year before, but that would’ve been inappropriate: morbid at best; indiscreet at worst. At home she kept a computer-printed copy of it folded in a decorative cloisonné box. And a second copy, ratty with wear, went wherever she did, in the small pocket of the daypack she used instead of a purse. She read it one more time as she sat in her sister’s office, on the edge of the sleeper sofa.
The news report shouldn’t have been a talisman, and yet…Its publication so soon after their return home had given Imogen some peace. It made the aftermath easier. Since then, she’d read online that Jeremy Haynes’s friends had scattered his ashes in the Canyon, his favorite place. Gale’s family issued statements too (some rather colorful), apologizing to his victims, and begging the public for information regarding his whereabouts. With or without a definitive ending, Imogen half expected that someday she’d get to watch a true crime documentary about Gale’s life. Maybe his disappearance would add to his legend.
