Bone Deep

by O'Brien, Kim;

  I turn to ask Emily what was so funny and catch her watching the two men. Her eyes have an intent, almost hungry expression. When she realizes I’m staring at her, the look in her eyes vanishes so completely that I wonder if I’ve imagined it.

  THREE

  Paige

  My father lives in a small, one-story stucco house with the same flat, red roofline as every other house on his street. Two giant, spiky cactus plants grow out of a bed of pebbles in the front yard, and two empty terra-cotta planters flank the wood-and-glass front door.

  “You hungry?” he asks as we step into the air-conditioning. He drops his keys next to a pile of mail stacked on a table that consists of three unopened moving boxes.

  “I need to shower first.”

  What I need most is to avoid my father.

  “Sure.” He sets his hat on a hook on the back of the front door. “I’ll start dinner. You want hotdogs or frozen pizza?”

  For a moment I think he’s joking and then realize he isn’t. My mother always did the cooking. With a sudden pang of longing, I think of her marinated chicken and pasta dish. Suddenly I understand my dad’s new, leaner look. “Pizza.”

  There’s no lock on my bedroom door, but I shut it with a definite click. The room is like walking into the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog. My dad basically went for it, and although I’d never tell him, I’ve always wanted a room like this.

  On the back wall, there’s a white vanity flanked between two towers that have hooks and cubbies for every kind of accessory. A brightly colored quilt covers the twin bed, which has hot pink sheets and pillows in four different shapes.

  My room is the only fully decorated one in the house. Apparently guilt, especially divorce guilt, has a price tag.

  Kicking my sneakers off, I head into the bathroom. I peel back the straps of my tank top and catch a glimpse in the mirror of a fairly good sunburn on my shoulders. For some reason, it makes me happy, as if finally the outside of me is as painful as the inside.

  Dinner is awkward. My father doesn’t have a kitchen table, so we eat in the living room on the smelly green velveteen couch that used to be in our basement. After a feeble attempt to discuss the great surprise of Emily and a long monologue on Dr. Shum’s exciting 3-D computer model of the ruins, he abandons the conversation effort and turns on CNN. Occasionally, he asks my opinion, and I reply in monosyllables. I think we’re both relieved when I retreat to my room.

  Settling myself on top of the quilt, which according to the Pottery Barn website is ironically called “Peace Patchwork” and costs nearly two hundred dollars, I log onto Connections. The first thing I see is a connect request from Emily Linton. I accept it and then check out her page. Her status says, “So excited my BF is finally here!”

  I scroll through a few of her conversations. Most are from friends I’ve never heard of, and it makes me feel sad that we’ve fallen so out of touch. I spend a lot of time looking at Emily’s photos. Most have been taken at the park, and the ruins, miniaturized by the massive cliffs, show in the background.

  In one shot, Emily has her arm around my father and a wide smile on her face. I study this shot the longest. Both of them are tanned and blond and wearing green park shirts. I think Emily looks more like his daughter than I do.

  By the time I log off, it’s late and the house is totally quiet. I think about calling my mom, but can’t bring myself to do it. The conversation will turn to how much she misses me, and I’ll end up comforting her instead of the other way around.

  I love her, but I’m also mad at her.

  Last fall, she could have fought harder for me. She could have given up the Yamaha piano and set of sterling flatware and maybe gotten more of me. Instead, she gave my summers to him, even though it wasn’t what I wanted. When I tried to talk to her, she simply said, “Please, Paige, you’re just making things harder.”

  Slipping out of the room, I feel my way silently down the dark hallway, avoiding the edges of the framed artwork, still wrapped in brown moving paper, which lean against wall. The lights in my father’s bedroom door are off, but a small beacon shines from the kitchen.

  I open the refrigerator and peer in. There’s a gallon of skim milk, a carton of orange juice, jars of some random condiments, a package of hotdogs, and several takeout containers.

  I systematically go through every drawer and every cabinet. I’m careful not to clang the silverware or rustle the plastic grocery bags stuffed beneath the sink. I note the brand of cereal and the kind of coffee he drinks. I hold a half-empty salt shaker to the light and see the tiny grains of rice mixed inside—my mother’s trick to keep the salt from clumping. I read the ingredients on an unopened bottle of Blue Desert Barbeque sauce and drink from the plastic jug of Tropicana orange juice. I smell his dish towels to see if they smell like Tide (they don’t) and sample a semi-stale chip from an opened bag of Doritos.

  None of these things give me the answers I want, but then again, I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for anyway. After a while, I pad silently back to my Pottery Barn room and slip beneath the covers of the guilt quilt.

  Staring at the dark ceiling, I promise myself that if things don’t get better, I’ll steal my father’s credit card and book a flight back to New Jersey. I’ll hitchhike to the airport if I have to.

  It doesn’t help to know that I can probably get myself to the airport and maybe even to New Jersey, but it doesn’t mean I belong there, either.

  FOUR

  Paige

  Emily Linton was not always my best friend. I was five years old when we met. My father was finishing up his PhD and working on a restoration project in New Mexico. Our parents introduced us, and even though Emily was nice to me, I knew she was just being polite. Mostly she was friends with the Navajo kids whose parents worked for my father. Emily had spent a year on the Navajo Nation and had even gone to a school there.

  I was homeschooled by my mother, but it was my father’s lessons that I craved. I was pretty proud of the fact that I could read petrogylphs and glue together the pieces of pottery that my father rejected. Before Emily, I was the child prodigy. I liked adults admiring my long, black hair, commenting on my pale blue eyes, and praising my archeological abilities.

  I couldn’t compete against Emily Linton. I couldn’t speak Diné Bizaad. I wasn’t as pretty or smart or popular. It sounds stupid now, but back then I feared my father wished that Emily was his daughter. I thought he loved me less because of her.

  I gave myself up to daydreams and built elaborate fantasy worlds in which I was popular. I changed my name from Paige Patterson to Kylila Unitas and pretended it meant “girl with the yellow hair.” It didn’t matter that my hair was black—Emily’s was blonde and that’s what I wanted.

  One morning I was excavating my favorite Barbie—Birthday Barbie, to be exact—from a shallow grave near the well where my father was studying an old burial ground. I was curious to see what Barbie would look like after being buried for a whole day—the longest I had ever let her spend in the ground. I wondered if she would turn leathery, like the remains my father found, and was happily in the process of digging her up when Emily Linton wandered up to me.

  She peered over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  I kept working and did not look up. When archeologists are about to uncover an important find, they do not let themselves get distracted. I kept slowly digging, ignoring her, like the way my father ignored me when he was working. My pulse jumped a little when I brushed the dirt off the face of my Barbie and her unblinking blue eyes stared back at me.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s the bones of an ancient Anassie Indian. I’ve never seen a body so well-preserved. We’ll need a tarp to cover the site.”

  I looked up, hoping she’d be impressed that I’d practically quoted my father about the tarp, but her arms were crossed and a smirk twisted her pink lips.

  “It’s not Anassie,” she said. “It’s Anasay-zi. And you’ve buried her all wrong. Her hair is br
aided when it should be loose on her shoulders. And she should be in a squatting position, not lying down. And she should be wrapped in a blanket, not wearing an evening dress.”

  My cheeks burned. I’d kept Birthday Barbie’s hair braided so it wouldn’t get ruined in the dirt. I wanted to argue that Emily was wrong about the hair and everything else, but I knew she wasn’t.

  Sitting back on my heels, I looked her in the eye. “Well,” I said. “That would be true if this were an ordinary Anasay-zi, but this is an Anassie Indian princess, which is a tribe much older than the Anasay-zi. They buried her this way because she’s not really dead. Her step-mother put a spell on her, and when the Indian prince kisses her, she’ll wake up.”

  It was an obvious steal from Snow White and I was old enough to know that it’d be embarrassing if she called me on it. But Emily’s eyes lit up like I’d said something really interesting and then she sat down next to me, so close our shoulders touched.

  “I think the prince should have a prayer stick and a ceremony if he’s going to bring her back from the spirit world.” And then she very casually added, “I could make one if you want.”

  Part of me wanted to ask about the Navajo kids and why she didn’t want to play with them. But a bigger part swelled with pride because she wanted to play with me—me, Paige Patterson, whose hair was black, not blonde, and who had strange, light blue eyes ringed with even weirder dark blue rims.

  “Okay,” I said and then honesty forced me to admit, “but we’re going to need to make a prince, too.”

  She smiled. “No problem. We can make one out of grass.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “There’s a secret place I know,” Emily said, “where the grass grows taller than anywhere else. Want to see it?”

  I wasn’t allowed to be out of sight of my parents, but when I looked over, they were with Emily’s parents, examining a grave they’d found near the water. I knew they wouldn’t notice if I was gone for a little while. Part of me was scared to break the rules, but another part of me knew that, no matter what the punishment was, it would be worth it.

  “Come on,” Emily urged, and together we ran into the field of tall grass that grew out from the edge of the water.

  In the morning, Emily takes me on a room-by-room tour of the ruins. Although yesterday I acted like I couldn’t care less when my father led me through the dark, soot-coated rooms, today with Emily as my guide, I can’t help but be fascinated. Can’t keep from staring at the charred remains of a fire pit and wondering about the family who lived here. Did they fight a lot or laugh? Did they fear the coming of night? Was there ever a girl like me standing in this same spot who wished she was anywhere else?

  Emily walks up to me. “You look so serious. What were you thinking?”

  Today she’s straightened her hair, and it falls in a long, yellow pony-tail with a razor-cut edge. She’s wearing a lot of dark eyeliner and mascara. I almost smile thinking about how we used to barely comb our hair when we were kids. How we swapped clothing, even though hers was too big for me.

  “I was thinking that it’s weird how everyone who lived here just vanished. And no one knows why. It’s sad.”

  Emily shakes her head. “I thought that at first, too—I kept wondering what happened to them. But then I started to see these ruins for what they are—a window into the past. Everything here tells a story. We’re learning so much, Paige. We’re going to find out what made them leave and where they went.”

  I think about my father—the clues he left behind—the few pens, pencils, and paperclips rattling around his desk and the nail holes where the pictures used to hang in his office. “Who cares what happened? They’re gone.”

  “Who’s gone?” a male voice says. We walk around the dividing wall and see one of my father’s interns—the blond with the crew cut—squatting by the stone and plaster base. He has a net in one hand and a specimen jar in the other.

  “Dale, you were eavesdropping,” Emily says, smiling despite the note of accusation in her voice.

  “If I were eavesdropping,” he replies, returning the smile, “I wouldn’t have asked a question.”

  “Yes, you would. Just so it wouldn’t look like you were eavesdropping.” Emily turns to me. “He’s smart but warped.” From the smile she gives me, however, warped doesn’t seem like a bad thing.

  “Not warped. Curious.” His blue eyes turn to me. “Emily has been telling me all about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stories about when you were kids.”

  I give Emily a sharp, sideways look. “What stories?”

  Emily laughs. “Only the good stuff, Paige, like how good you were at excavation work. How you could look at a site and start making up all sorts of stories about the people who used to live there.”

  She holds my gaze a moment longer. Long enough for me to see that she hasn’t forgotten the other stuff we did, the stuff we’d promised each other never to tell anyone else.

  “Already flirting with her, Dale?” Another of my father’s interns walks over to us. He’s average height, with straight, dark hair and a lean, intellectual-looking face. “Don’t believe a word he says—unless you give him a math problem.” He extends a narrow, long-fingered hand to me. “Jeremy Brown,” he says. As his grip lingers on mine, he adds, “We met yesterday.”

  I remember him. Dark, deep-set eyes, straight nose, and longish bangs that flop forward.

  “Don’t you have some wall you need to be studying?” Dale asks.

  Jeremy’s smile widens. “Better to study walls than bugs.”

  “It’s their research projects,” Emily says. “Dale is comparing the DNA he extracts from the beetles he finds in the ruins with the DNA of ancient beetles.”

  She starts to explain the focus of Dale’s study, but behind her, in the distance, I see Jalen Yazzi coming into view. He’s wearing another stretched-out, plaster-splattered T-shirt and a pair of loose basketball shorts. On his wide shoulders, he carries a barrel-shaped, red Igloo cooler, and between it and his height, he’s almost too tall for the low ceiling. Yet he walks smoothly, gracefully maneuvering around the broken divider walls.

  I try not to stare, but he’s beautiful in a way that makes it nearly impossible not to. He gets within a few feet, and I feel my heart beat faster. I keep my gaze on him, but he walks right past.

  I know he saw me, even if he didn’t acknowledge me. Wiping the sweat from my brow, I wonder how obvious I was, if he guessed that I think he’s hot, and I know that I was probably embarrassingly obvious. What was I thinking? I vow never to even look in his direction again. It must have been jet lag or I never would have acted like such an idiot.

  Emily touches my arm and laughs. Fortunately she seems to have missed the whole thing. I quickly laugh too, but I have no idea why.

  I try to put the whole thing behind me and focus on all the cool stuff in the ruins—the chamber where the skeleton of a child was buried in the wall and the petroglyphs carved in the stones.

  I do a pretty good job of not thinking about Jalen until we break at noon. Emily and I retrieve our lunches from our backpacks. When I put my water bottle to my lips, it’s full and the water is cold—way colder than it should be. I drink it in greedy gulps, and it slides down my throat in a long, cool stream.

  I think of the Igloo cooler balanced on Jalen’s shoulder. Did he refill my water bottle? If so, why?

  FIVE

  Paige

  “Dale and Jeremy both like you,” Emily states a few days later. “You should pick one and put them out of their misery.”

  Today she’s taking me to see Tacoma Well, which—after the ruins in the cliffs—is the park’s biggest tourist attraction, about a mile from the information center. The path, lined in small stones, is barely wide enough for us both and completely shadeless. Although it’s barely nine o’clock in the morning, the sun is already blistering; it feels like heat is growing out of the ground like an invisible crop. I’m quickly coated in
sweat and dust.

  “I don’t think they’re exactly in misery,” I tell her. “I just met them.”

  “I know,” Emily replies, “but you should have some fun this summer. I want you to like it here. Dale is better-looking, but Jeremy has the brains.”

  I study the ground in front of us. As kids, we would never have stayed between the lines of a defined path. I almost want to kick some of the stones out of the way.

  “Look, I’m not dating either of them. Besides, I’m already having fun.” I say it in such a purposely morose tone that Emily laughs and pushes my shoulder.

  “You’ll like it here,” Emily promises. “And you’re right. You don’t need either of those guys. It’s going to be you and me—just like the old times.”

  I give her a quick, sideways glance. Is she going to talk about what happened? Do I even want her to?

  “Look,” she says, “we’re here.”

  Tacoma Well is an enormous, round sinkhole filled by an underground spring with water the color of green JELL-O. The stones lining the well are rough, jagged, and porous-looking. It takes me a few minutes, but then I realize some of the black spots between the stones are not just gaps, but small caves.

  “Hold on,” I say as Emily starts to climb down past the rim. Pulling out my cell, I begin snapping pictures.

  Emily strikes a pose, pretending to be falling over the edge. I snap the shot and then a couple more of her. We take some together, too—crazy ones that sometimes cut parts of our heads out of the photo because I hold out my arm and shoot without looking where I’m focusing.

  Afterward, we climb down into the well. The pitch is steep, and the only sound is the shuffle of our hiking boots on the stone. It’s so easy to feel time slipping away, that Emily and I are ten years old again and exploring, something that feels comfortably familiar and yet totally strange, as if I have dreamed the last seven years of my life.