A pamphlet told Amber about a new structure called the Grand Canyon Skywalk, which at the moment can only be reached by driving for about fourteen miles on an ungraded, unpaved road. Paul turns onto the non-road, loose stones pinging off the windshield, the car rocking like a rowboat tossed in rough seas. Paul is grumbling about the car being dinged, about ruining his tires. He says, “Goddamn canyon is a thousand miles long and we have to go to the worst part.” Amber assures him it will be worth it, because the majesty of the place will be such that they will be rendered speechless, and they’ll be able to conduct a somber farewell ceremony to Kait, who Amber says is kind of like a sister to them all now, the way they’ve bonded. She says, “You owe her this. She would have wanted this,” with such conviction that it is almost possible to forget that Amber knows nothing appreciable about Kait or what Hunter owes her or what she would have wanted. Since the revelation of the ashes, Amber has spent an inordinate amount of time saying things about Kait like she sounds great and she was an amazing woman and she was a beautiful person. They all talk about her like she was an inspiration, putting her on a pedestal just because she’s dead, probably because they think this is what he wants to hear, but it’s not at all what he wants, because he already knows all the lovable and admirable things about her, and what he really wants is for someone to just tell him it’s okay to feel broken and he’s under no obligation to feel better. What they’re doing is they’re commandeering her memory and twisting her into the image of someone they can admire. They’re allowing her to act as an avatar for their own deceased loved ones. They’re stealing her from him, and he needs to reclaim her by making some kind of decisive action.
When they reach their destination, Paul parks behind a line of seven tour vans. Only three hundred feet away, a U-shaped walkway juts out over the canyon like a plexiglass tongue. There are about two hundred people on the skywalk, leaning over the rails on both sides and searching toward the bottom. What happens here is what happens at most tourist venues: tour groups arrive, stroll around aimlessly, take dozens of pictures to prove they were here, then they go away after a few minutes because they’re hungry. Many of them have no particular interest in experiencing their experiences, as opposed to simply recording those experiences. If Kait were here, she would want to pose for a nice picture along the edge of the skywalk, and he would pose with her, despite his worries about both of them falling over the rail in a freak accident, and despite his longstanding objections to vacationing just for the pictures. Years ago, standing on the beach in Portland, Maine, watching all the other couples lining up for their photos of the sun sparkling on the water, he tried to explain why he hates how a good vacation is defined not as a time for growth and learning about other cultures but rather as going to a place where you get a lot of good pictures as evidence of worldliness or wealth or whatever. She listened quietly and said: “You would have a lot more fun if you let yourself have more fun.” And here he is, still in line for the skywalk, and posing in a group photo with his companions and Kait. As much as he complained about the proliferation of amateur photography, he finds himself playing exactly the role he once rejected: a man in an interesting place, just hoping to capture something, even if he doesn’t know what it is. He’s wasted so much energy in his life raging against things without any particular reason besides that he didn’t understand them; would it have been so hard to just take some more pictures with Kait? Would it have been so bad to smile for two seconds and wait for the flash and then move on without needing to editorialize? Amber uses Hunter’s phone to snap a picture of him with Kait standing at a rail along the edge. But he decides not to upload it, hasn’t uploaded a photo since revealing the truth about Kait to the others. He thinks about deleting the picture entirely but also has to admit, it is pretty amazing, the view.
Being surrounded by tourists is like being besieged by funhouse mirrors. There are old people, young people, fat people, thin people, slovenly people, well-dressed people, and they all look a little bit like everyone else at the same time that they look slightly different. Most of them move in pairs.
When Hunter’s group gets their turn to test the skywalk, Paul grips the interior rail and does not look down, shimmying rigidly along the frosted opaque edge of the walkway. Austin stomps through the middle, stares down and jumps, causes the walkway to vibrate and sends a few people into momentary panic. It is more frightening up here than Hunter thought it would be; obviously thousands of people have done this same thing before them, and obviously the skywalk has passed countless safety tests conducted by certified engineers, but still he holds on to the rail, shuffling as if walking on ice, and steps gingerly into the middle of the walkway as if dipping a toe in a freezing lake. He wants to stay away from the rail because the thought of dropping Kait over the edge is nightmarish, and so he forces himself to stand in the middle and look down—a vertiginous view into a seemingly endless scar gouged into the earth, a wound dealt to the continent that eventually became part of its character. Standing here is like levitating; at any moment he could plummet like Wile E. Coyote and disappear in a cloud of dust. He loses himself in the search toward the bottom, scans the layers of sediment in the walls, the changing colors like the test pattern on a TV, a visible record of millions of years of evolution. The reminder that nature is prehistoric, is infinite. When he looks up, they’re all gone.
He finds them outside the gift shop. Amber and Austin have bought a Native American dream catcher, which she says they can hang over their baby’s crib, a comment that causes Austin to physically recoil. Amber turns to Hunter. “So when are we going to do the ashes?” she says, clapping her hands in a school-marmish chopchop way that makes him feel like he has somehow failed her.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It just seems a little bit arbitrary.”
“But it’s amazing up here,” Amber says. “If I was . . . if I had passed on, I’d want to be spread out here. One last romantic gesture.”
“She liked nature and everything, but this is just a place.” Austin wanders off, kicking up mounds of dirt and then sifting through them as if searching for fossils. Paul jingles his keys in his pocket.
“You have to do it somewhere,” she says. “Why not here?”
“What’s the rush?”
“Are you kidding me?” she says. “That was the whole point of coming out here.” She looks like she has to restrain herself from yanking the urn from his hands and disposing of Kait in front of him. Hunter grips Kait tighter, prepares himself for a fight.
“Who ever said I wanted to come here?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did we inconvenience you?” she says. “When you invited yourself to join our vacation, should we have asked you for permission to do what we wanted? Was it rude for us to ask you to stop lying? No, no, don’t say anything, I’m just trying to apologize, I feel so bad about going out of our way to do everything for you while we’re on our vacation.” She sucks in a harsh breath. “Maybe next time instead of telling us what’s wrong with everything you can do something about it.” She waves a dismissive hand at him and turns away, kicks a loose stone into the canyon. “I mean, what the hell do you want?”
Hunter listens for the sound of the rock hitting bottom, but it is a sound he will never hear. Austin has returned, and rubs a soothing hand on Amber’s back. It took less than two weeks for him to alienate his new friends; the only people who have ever been able to tolerate long exposure to him were Kait and Willow.
Paul sidles up to him, says, “You’re looking hungry.” With an arm on Hunter’s back, Paul guides him toward the car.
THE NEXT MORNING WHILE Paul is gone on his walk, Austin asks Hunter if he drinks. Hunter says no, not really, so Austin asks him what he does for fun. Hunter says, “I like to get high sometimes,” and before he has finished speaking, Austin unfurls a plastic bag containing a half ounce of musty smelling marijuana. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Austin says, but he doesn’t wait for an answer, because he’
s already packing a glass bowl that Amber has extracted from her suitcase. In hindsight, Hunter realizes that Austin and Amber have both been getting high throughout this trip—the glassy eyes, the frequent use of Visine, the constant snacking, the inexplicable and sudden onset of fatigue every afternoon. It’s hard to figure why they’ve included him now; maybe they had thought he was a narc. Maybe news of Kait’s death humanized him. Maybe they’re just feeling generous. Or maybe they’re offering an olive branch after yesterday’s blow-up.
They smoke in the bathroom with the exhaust whirring, towels stuffed under the doors, water running in the sink, and the pot hits Hunter harder than he expected because he hasn’t smoked since that night months ago with Willow. The others, they’re fresh out of college, so their tolerance is high as it will ever be. They shotgun hits into one another’s mouths, Amber grabbing Hunter’s cheeks, closing in on him intimately and blowing the smoke into his lungs as if delivering CPR. They alternate between giggling and hacking and listening at the door for Paul, and when they emerge from the bathroom, a thin line of smoke trails them like a pursuing wraith. After opening the windows, they run down to the hotel’s vending machines and load up on snacks for the upcoming ride.
On the road, the world looks more vibrant, the colors on the mountainsides bleed into one another, blurs of light surrounding the car. Conversation progresses in stops and starts, bursts of noise that mean essentially nothing but seem incredibly important and also hilarious. The joy of meaningless language. The comfort of swaddling oneself in empty banter. The satisfying crunch of potato chips in desert-dry mouths. They’re laughing at nearly everything, avoiding eye contact with Paul. Hunter smirks at them in the side mirror, and they smirk back, a shared secret. Paul was a drinker and an addict, maybe he knows, he probably knows, so what if he knows? But he might know. Enjoying inside jokes again. Feeling like a college student, harmlessly sneaky, losing oneself in the present, living without consequences. Feeling not at all old. Ravenous. The sensation of limitless possibility. The car still humming as they head west. Uterine warmth, heavy-headed fatigue.
THEY STOP AT THE California border so Amber and Austin can take a picture of themselves standing at the sign welcoming them to the state. Hunter stays in the car, which Paul keeps running, the air conditioner roaring. The effects of the pot have faded and they’ve had their naps and their food, and Amber is back on her quest for closure.
Kait once told Hunter she had the perfect place for his ashes. They were talking about death, having one of those hypothetical conversations couples have about the inevitable, but it was such an abstraction that it barely qualified as a real consideration. They agreed on the do-not-resuscitate issue, the cremation issue, the no-funeral issue, and then she said what she said. About the perfect place. She never told him where it was, said it should be a surprise for him after he was dead, and even now he can’t think of where he would want his own ashes to be spread, so how could she have figured it out so quickly? He told her then that he had a place for her too, but actually he had no ideas at all, still doesn’t, probably would hold on to her forever if nobody was pushing him.
They visit several more potential ash-spreading sites—an organic farm, an outer-space-themed bowling alley shaped like a UFO, a Methodist church, some sites chosen more carefully than others. Some places choose to remain stuck in time like Wild Bill’s Wild West Outpost, while most others evolve naturally and become what they have to become because they have no choice. A building that once served as a general store for gold-rushing pioneers has been revamped as a boutique hotel. An elementary school is built adjacent to the site of a bloody battle waged between settlers and the Mohave Indians. Everywhere they go, the functions and meanings of locations have deviated from their original purpose. An old warship is now an aspirational dining restaurant. A governor’s mansion burns to the ground and is rebuilt as a nightclub. Turn-of-the-century factories, long abandoned, become luxury condos. Even the Grand Canyon, with its ancient geology, is changing constantly.
When they arrive at a lake surrounded by rental cabins, Amber takes three steps onto the property and declares, “This one isn’t right for us,” and then they continue driving.
At a rest stop, Hunter tells Austin he doesn’t really want to do this, says, “I feel bad taking over your trip,” and Austin looks over his shoulder at Amber, who is scouting out new locations on the map, and he rolls his eyes. Says, “There’s nothing you can do when she gets like this.”
“If something needs to get done, I get it done,” she says. She directs Paul to keep driving west. They are headed inexorably toward the sea.
WHILE AMBER CRAMS ANOTHER gift-shop knickknack into her bag—a coffee mug that says CALIFORNIA GIRLS HAVE ALL THE FUN—Paul says, “How about we stop screwing around and get you three some real souvenirs?” He pulls up his shirt and shows them the tattoo on his right pectoral, a pair of daisies crossed at the stem. He tells them he got it done when he and Annalisa took this trip three decades ago; he chose daisies because she had told him her name was Daisy when they started dating, and for the first six months of their relationship, he had known her only by that name.
Paul has no intention of getting a tattoo himself; he’s saving space on his other pectoral for when his wife returns. Austin wants a tattoo because it’s something to do and some of his friends have really cool ones on their biceps and on their backs. Amber says, “Tattoos are stupid, and anyway they look terrible on people when they get old.”
“If I make it to seventy,” Hunter says, “I’m probably not going to be too worried about people laughing at my tattoo.”
“God, do you ever agree with anyone on anything?” Amber says. She smiles to make it seem like she’s joking.
Austin attempts to sway her with romance logic: “We could get matching tattoos and have them forever.”
“What, so then we both look stupid?” she says. “No deal. You’re on your own, Hunter.” The tattoo parlor is a small place, a storefront business on a main street in some town they can’t find on the map. There is no room inside for the others to wait with him, no one to squeeze his hand at the first bite of the needle, no one to give him a pep talk and assure him he is doing the right thing. Amber is in the car, holding on to Kait.
Actually, Hunter has considered getting a tattoo since high school, thought it would make him seem edgy, like owning a pet python or wearing vintage Black Flag T-shirts to family functions.
The permanence of the tattoo makes it difficult to choose a design; the inking of tattoos is the most lasting commitment many people will ever make. Even marriage ends at death, but tattoos linger beyond. Based on the samples hanging around the room and the suggestion binder sitting on the table, Hunter gleans that this particular shop specializes in folkloric images—wizards, dragons, trolls. He flips through the book but knows he can’t pick something from there; a tattoo is supposed to be a deeply personal accessory that will reflect one’s values, beliefs, and sense of humor, so what does it reflect about him if he selects something from the back page of a binder full of generic choices? He briefly considers requesting a pair of family crests—Dixon and Cady—but he still hasn’t figured out what his crest would be, and he doesn’t want a reminder of that other family etched into his body forever.
In the back room, he tells the artist he wants something simple to commemorate his dead wife, and without much discussion, they begin. It hurts more than he thought it would. Like a swarm of yellow jackets. He wishes he were stronger, or fatter, or something. The needle feels so close to the bone. To cry now would weaken the gesture, would make him seem uncommitted. The buzzing ends as abruptly as it began.
Before he even leaves the chair, he regrets the unoriginality in his design. R.I.P. Kait on the inside of his right forearm, no ornamentation, no color, no flourishes on the font. Just seven letters and three periods, like a discount telegram. He’s shamed by the limits of his own imagination, the consistent failure to do anything the way it ought to
be done.
He could have made literary allusions, or gotten a true artist to create a portrait of her on his back. Could have covered his entire body in tributes to her, become the Twenty-first Century Illustrated Man. Could have turned his body into a work of art and been invited to stand naked against white museum walls while people trekked across the country to see him, studying him for hours while unraveling the history of Kait Cady. He could have used his otherwise useless body to promote the story of the most remarkable person he has ever known, inspired hundreds of thousands of people to talk about her in the same way they talk about Mona Lisa and Flaming June and the Girl with the Pearl Earring. A living memorial to her. Could have disappeared into Kait and let the world filter his existence through hers, worn her like a second skin and carried her with him forever.
•••
EVEN THOUGH SHE’D NEVER shared his enthusiasm for moving, Kait had been convinced by Hunter’s presentation that they should at least visit San Francisco, to see the barking sea lions piled on top of one another at the ends of the piers, to stand on a cliffside while the fog rolled over them and they disappeared momentarily from the world, to take a hot air balloon over the wineries in Napa. Hunter never thought they’d make it there, thought the European trips would supersede domestic tourism. And yet, with Kait in hand, he is standing on Fisherman’s Wharf, the pungent air sour with yeast. They’d hit the end of Route 66 two days ahead of schedule, and so Hunter had convinced them to head north for this final stop. Three thousand miles from home, he and Kait are watching a line of street performers entertaining people in all directions. There are musicians and dancers and mannequin people and magicians and washed-up hippies with funny panhandling signs.
The Young Widower's Handbook Page 21
