by Gwen Florio
“You just called me a cunt,” she’d tell them. “Now go fuck yourselves.” Then she’d sit back and watch those boys go a whiter shade of pale. That’s the thing I love about her. Naomi doesn’t believe in going along to get along. Me, I’ve said those sorts of things beneath my breath lots of times. Naomi, she says them loud and proud.
“Well?” Shizhé‘é dropped the sheet. He was waiting for something. I can’t see his companion anymore but can feel him inside me, raking anew at my lungs with clawlike fingers.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” I said past the rattle in my throat. “None of it was.” Same thing I told him every night.
“But it did,” he said. Same reply he made every night. “And I’m still dead.”
His companion floated beside him. “And so am I.”
TWENTY-THREE
Lola awoke the next day to blinding sunlight and silence.
She fumbled on the nightstand for her phone, held it close to her face, and squinted. Eight in the morning. She heard a swish, not enough time to brace herself, and Bub whomped onto her chest, forcing the air from her lungs, bathing her face and hands with his tongue. “Go bother somebody else,” she managed when she got her breath back. She shoved him aside and made her way to the bathroom, where she splashed water on her face and scrubbed at her teeth with her toothbrush. She padded barefoot into an empty kitchen. Two sticky notes hung from a cupboard above the coffeepot, whose contents were fast going to sludge. Lola poured and drank anyway, and, once her eyes had refocused, examined the notes. Back to work with Naomi, said one in Charlie’s handwriting. It was Saturday, but the attacks would mandate seven-day work weeks until the bomber was captured.
Getting an early start, said the other in tall, back-slanted scrawl. Watch the girls? I owe you. Suggested outing—Antelope Canyon. I booked you on a tour at ten. It’s about an hour and a half away. The note was signed with a slashing N. Lola figured the “I owe you” was the closest thing she’d get to an acknowledgment, let alone an apology, from Naomi for the previous night’s strain.
She reached for an apple, further unbalancing the fruit bowl’s perfect arrangement. A stack of textbooks sat beside it. Poli Sci. Criminal Justice. Chemistry. So Thomas was back from wherever he’d been. Sleeping in? Lola bit into the apple and stepped to the window. His car was gone, though. Maybe he’d accompanied Naomi and Charlie. There was no sign—or sound—of the girls. “Why aren’t you with them?” Lola asked Bub around a bite of apple. “If you left them alone while they went for a ride on that pony, you’re in trouble.” The chunk of apple stuck in her throat. The remark had been a lighthearted rebuke, but it occurred to her that the girls could have crept from the quiet house, and that she had no way of knowing where they might be. She tossed the apple core into the sink, sprinted down the hall to the girls’ room, and flung open the door. Two forms stirred in the twin beds. Lola sagged against the wall. “Wake up, sleepyheads,” she said, her voice shaky.
“No,” came an indistinct voice from the lump beneath the covers on Margaret’s bed. Although Margaret had inherited her father’s talent for instantaneous deep sleep, she lacked his ability to go from near-coma to instant wakefulness. Mornings were a contest of wills between Lola and Margaret, mother sometimes carrying daughter’s limp form to the breakfast table. There, she’d dump Margaret into a chair, insert a spoon into her hand, and remind her, several times, that the bowl of cereal before her was not a decoration.
Lola looked to Bub for help. Margaret was much more likely to arise, sometimes even cheerfully, after Bub’s exuberant ministrations. But Bub cringed against the bedroom’s far wall, ears flat against his head. He curled his lip and refused to move when Lola called to him.
“A lot of good you are. Come on, girls. We need to get a move on if we’re going to go to Antelope Canyon today.”
“Don’ want to.” Margaret would have objected to a trip to Disneyland if it were suggested first thing in the morning.
“Too bad. Hey, Juliana.” Lola raised her voice. “You too. Both of you, up and dressed and in the kitchen in five.” Lola yanked the covers from Margaret and reached over and did the same to Juliana, who responded by rolling onto her stomach and pulling her pillow over her head. Lola turned to the dresser and found clothes for Margaret, then lowered herself to her hands and knees and rooted under the bed for Margaret’s sneakers. Her hand closed around one. She pulled it toward her. Something brushed the back of her hand. The sneaker emerged into the light, just as the tarantula emerged from the sneaker.
Later, Charlie would swear he’d heard the shriek all the way in Gaitero.
“Windows shattered,” he said. “Eardrums burst. People ran for cover. Everybody grabbed their cellphones and dialed 911.”
Lola rubbed at her hand as though she could still feel the bristly touch against her flesh. “It’s not funny,” she said. “And poor Bub.”
The dog, his wiser instincts undone by the sound of her scream, had rushed to her defense, snapping at the creature as it raised its forelegs. Now his snout was swollen to twice its normal size, flesh stretched tight around the angry wound. Worse than the bite, Naomi had earlier informed Lola as she held a handkerchief dipped in vinegar to Bub’s nose, were the tiny sharp hairs the spiders hurled in defense. “They’re like needles. We’ll never find them all. They’ll work their way out eventually. We’ll give him a Benadryl to help with the itching. That’ll make him sleep, too. That should help.”
Lola had nodded, faking a calm she in no way felt. It was all she could do to keep her gaze fixed on Bub instead of letting it roam the kitchen, darting into corners and under the edges of cabinets, places that might shelter more lurking arachnids. The trip to Antelope Canyon had been abandoned. She’d called Naomi and Charlie as soon as she’d gotten herself, the girls, and Bub out of the room, slamming the door tight and, for good measure, blocking the opening beneath it with rolled-up towels.
Now Naomi directed Lola to hold the vinegar-soaked cloth to Bub’s face before she and Charlie hotfooted it back to her office, Naomi barely concealing her annoyance. “Edgar’s on his way home,” she said. “He’ll take care of the spider. He knows how.”
The bedroom door stayed shut, and the girls remained in their pajamas, until Edgar stomped into the house and disappeared into the girls’ bedroom with a Tupperware container and a sheet of paper in his hand. He returned some moments later with the tarantula in the container and the paper held tight across it. Lola shrank from the sight.
“Don’t worry,” Edgar said. Bub growled as he passed. “I’m going to release it outdoors.”
“Outdoors” covered a lot of territory, Lola thought. Edgar probably meant the yard. Lola would have preferred the next county.
“Here’s the thing,” she said to Charlie as they lay together at the end of the interminable day. “The door to the girls’ room was closed when I went to wake them up.”
“So?”
“So how did that thing get in there? The window’s really high. And tarantulas are ground spiders.” Lola had spent much of the afternoon in the shade house, scrolling through spider websites on her phone as the girls rode back and forth on Valentine, interrupting her research with occasional entreaties to widen their range.
“Don’t even think about it,” Lola had said, scanning the ground around the pony’s hooves for hairy, skittering creatures. Her own feet were tucked up in the chair.
“What are you saying?” Charlie asked now. The words slow, the question reluctant.
Lola stalled her answer. “Did you go in there last night?”
“Only to kiss them good night. And that was early.”
“And you closed the door behind you, right?”
His head brushed hers in a nod. “So you think … ?”
Lola thought of how Charlie and Edgar had walked into the house after dinner the previous evening, heads close together
for a moment, then thrown back in shared laughter, the years of tension between them dissolving noticeably by the day. Tread carefully, she warned herself.
“I’m not saying anything. Not for sure. I just think we should consider the possibility that somebody put that damn thing in there.”
Lola lay awake a long time after Charlie fell asleep on the far side of the bed, his back a hard plank of rejection. His words looped back through her head. “I don’t believe this. You’re accusing my brother.”
“I didn’t accuse anyone. I just said—”
“Who else could it be? Naomi didn’t want to deal with it when she came back.”
Lola thought of the textbooks on the counter. “Thomas was here sometime yesterday. He left some of his things.”
“And now you’re accusing a boy. Someone who’s like a son to my brother.”
Not a boy, Lola thought. She put Thomas at about twenty, a grown man. That guessed-at age was nearly all she knew about him. He was like a shadow, flitting in and out of the house, his face seemingly set in a permanent scowl, the scar across his cheekbone an emphatic underscore to his mood. He only seemed to soften in Juliana’s presence.
“Juliana worships him.” Charlie’s voice echoed her own thoughts. “He’d never do anything that would hurt her.”
The tarantula had been in Margaret’s shoe, not Juliana’s, Lola thought. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw again its striped forelegs raised high in preparation to strike, heard Bub’s wail of pain. Imagined the creature’s jaws sunk instead in Margaret’s soft skin. She fought an impulse to leave Charlie alone in the bed, tiptoe down the hall to the girls’ room, crawl into bed with her sleeping daughter and wrap her arms tight around her, shielding her against the danger that, despite Charlie’s protests, she felt closing in on her family.
TWENTY-FOUR
With some satisfaction, Lola surveyed the lunch she’d packed. Sandwiches, fruit, and two gallons of water. She was getting the hang of the desert.
Naomi quirked a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Sure that’ll be enough?” A moment later, she flashed a grin, showing her chipped tooth to charming advantage. Lola took that as a good sign. Maybe she could make an ally of Naomi after all, enlist her in softening Edgar’s opposition to her presence in his brother’s life. “I’m so glad you’re going to Antelope Canyon,” Naomi said now. “I was afraid, after you canceled yesterday, that you’d never get there.”
Tourists like Lola couldn’t go wandering off into the celebrated slot canyon on their own. Navajo-run tour companies led people through the canyon’s two access points, Upper and Lower. Lola was lucky, Naomi told her, that spots for her and the girls were available again. “This time of year, it’s so hot that not as many people go. Plus, it can be a little dicey because of flash floods during summer cloudbursts. But there’s no rain in the forecast, and besides, the guides have a good weather eye. You’ll be fine. You’ve got your camera, right?”
Lola held up her phone, ignoring the flicker of disdain across Naomi’s face. The woman probably had a Leica with a pro’s array of lenses, she thought.
“You’ll be gone all day,” Naomi said. “And Gar and I will probably be working into the night. Sorry that Charlie’s stuck with me.” So am I, Lola thought as Naomi rattled on. “There’s a quiche in the refrigerator for dinner. Just help yourself when you get back.”
A quiche? Lola couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen one on a menu, let alone heard of anyone baking one. She shook her head at yet another example of Naomi’s effortless perfection. She shook it again at Bub, hovering beside her. He was sleepy from the Benadryl, nose still swollen, though not to the previous day’s clownish proportions. “You’re staying here today.” She couldn’t, in good conscience, leave the dog alone in the truck during the tour, even in the unlikely event she found a shady place to park. She carried a tiny thermometer clipped to her bookbag, which she’d left sitting in the shade house the previous day; when she’d retrieved it, the mercury had measured 107.
Bub threw himself down in a corner of the kitchen and shot accusing glances at her as she marshaled the girls through their breakfast. Even her offering, made after Naomi left for work, of the breakfast plates to lick clean failed to win Bub’s approval. He polished the plates but stalked away as soon as he’d finished, refusing to come when she called a goodbye to him—not unlike the way Charlie had departed earlier that morning, turning his head so that her kiss brushed his cheek instead of his lips.
Edgar, as usual, left without acknowledging the forced cheeriness of her goodbye. Just as well she hadn’t seen Thomas that morning, Lola thought. “Just one more male who’d have been mad at me,” she muttered as she held the truck’s back door open for the girls.
It felt strange not to have Bub beside her, Lola thought as she set off in the usual cloud of red dust, venting her annoyance with a quick stomp of the gas pedal. Let Charlie spend yet another day in an air-conditioned office with his sister-in-law on what was supposed to have been his honeymoon. Lola had every intention of taunting him at the end of the day with photographs of what would have been a romantic outing to Antelope Canyon—as romantic as an outing could be with two youngsters in tow.
“I’ll show you,” she whispered, a mantra usually applied to rival reporters, recalcitrant sources, and editors who wielded a red pen too freely for her taste. But never, until this minute, at her husband.
Charlie often commented on Lola’s ability to nurse a grudge. It was, she’d always say in response, what fueled her ability to out-report other journalists. Beat her once on a story, and never again. Now bitter thoughts typically reserved for competing reporters twisted like snakes, jabbing at her with poisoned fangs as she drove toward the canyon. She’d always taken Charlie’s loyalty for granted. If anyone in Magpie had questioned their relationship—and Lola was sure there’d been plenty of that—he’d never let on. But now the questions came from Gar, the person who, after Margaret and Lola, meant the most to him. And Lola was questioning that person in return, putting herself in the way of Charlie’s renewed relationship with his only brother. What if Charlie felt he had to choose between them? And if he did, whom would he choose?
Lola’s eyes flitted to the rearview mirror and fastened on Margaret, her trump card. So there, she thought. But then, Margaret was blood, as was Edgar. Not just any blood, but Blackfeet blood, precious in that it conferred tribal enrollment.
Lola rubbed at her damnably white forehead, trying to erase such thoughts. Their arrival at the canyon provided welcome distraction, and any lingering anxiety leached away with her first glimpse of the cleft in the smooth rock of the desert, so narrow she could have stepped across it.
“Here.” The guide leading their group gestured toward an opening, barely wider. Metal steps led down into blackness. “You were good to get an early start,” he said. “Later in the day, even this time of year, it will be crowded. And the upper canyon will be worse. Tourists can’t seem to get it into their heads just how hot the days are here. We should have the lower canyon mostly to ourselves, though.” Lola couldn’t imagine anyone foolish enough to endure the jolting ride across the desert in the blaze of midday sun. Ten in the morning and already the mercury nudged three digits. The temperature fell apace with her descent down five flights of stairs—some barely more than ladders—into the slot canyon. She’d hesitated at the top, fearing a repeat of the vertigo she’d felt on the ladder at the cliff houses. But the canyon walls hugged her tight, and the darkness below cloaked any awareness of just how far she was from the canyon floor.
“Oh,” she breathed as she reached the bottom, tilting her head back to trace the winding blue thread of sky visible far above the canyon floor. Her feet sank in sand soft as talcum powder. Rock walls, striped red and yellow and gold, wound sinuously up and away. Lola stretched her arms, flattening one hand against the wall to the left, the other against the opposite wall, let
ting the cool soak into her palms.
“This way.” The guide led them to the left.
“What’s back there?” Lola pointed right. The canyon meandered away into gloom.
“Lake Powell, eventually.” He led the group ahead. Camera clicks, alternating with gasps of wonder, marked their progress. Lola heard low conversations in German. French. Even in their multinational enthusiasm, people spoke with the hushed reverence usually reserved for cathedrals.
Lola had heard of the reservation’s famed Canyon de Chelly and Chaco Canyon. She’d decided to put off those trips until Charlie could accompany them. And she’d easily persuaded him that at some point on their honeymoon, they owed it to Margaret to leave the Navajo Nation for a side trip to the Grand Canyon, only about three hours away. Somehow, she’d missed any reference to Antelope Canyon. Now, as the guide led the group farther into the canyon and she stood alone in awe, she was glad she’d arrived with no preconceived notions. She listened from a distance as the guide talked on and on, explaining the geologic forces that had created the fifty-foot-deep gouge in the earth, and the sobering reality of the flash floods that occasionally coursed through it, rising high between the narrow walls, capturing people unawares, drowning them as they scrabbled for nonexistent purchase on the smooth, inward-sloping canyon walls. Juliana and Margaret stood rapt before him, taking in every word.
Lola drifted backward, letting a hand trail over the rock, imagining she could feel the stripes beneath her fingertips. She wanted to experience the canyon on her own. She reached the ladders. The sound of the guide’s lecture, the girls’ high-voiced questions, faded. The narrow fissure beyond beckoned. Lola stepped into the darkness. There was a dampness to it, welcome after days in the desiccating heat. She inhaled, imagining she could catch the scent of faraway Lake Powell.
