“How the hell did you get in here?”
“I have my ways,” Johnny said, shrugging, his round face crinkling like paper in a fist.
She knew well enough not to press Johnny. She understood how he fit into Wade’s life—a pit bull kind of friend, the type you have around if you’re unsure of where you stand in the world.
“Whatever,” Vivian said to Johnny. “What’s wrong with him anyway? I thought he was in Fresno.” She stepped toward Wade. His breath was vinegar.
“Got home today. He came to pick up his car and we took some pills.”
“Brilliant,” Vivian said.
Johnny dismissed her with a paw to the air. “It’s nothing. For real. He’ll sleep it off.”
“Here?”
“Unless you got another boyfriend coming,” Johnny said.
“Can’t you take him home? Where’s June?”
“She went home hours ago. Besides, he told me he wanted to see you.”
“This was before he lost control of his face?” Wade’s head sagged, a guttural sound escaping, his mop of hair hiding his eyes. “Why can’t he stay with you?”
“Because,” Johnny said, his face scrunching up again.
Vivian smiled. “You still live with your mom, don’t you?”
“So what,” Johnny said, his red eyes on her. “You do, too.”
“Funny that,” Vivian said, almost ready to have a laugh over Mommy’s disappearance (but no, too soon). “Except I’m seventeen,” she said. “What’re you, thirty?”
“Just wait. It’s never gonna be this good again, girl.” He gestured to the other wing of the house and then up the hillside. “Plus I hear you’ve got a real fan club up here.”
Vivian sighed. “Whatever. Just put him in there.” She gestured at the chaise just inside the sliding doors to her room.
Steering Wade inside, Johnny kicked over a jar of sea glass, but otherwise successfully arranged Wade in a seated position, while Wade kept blubbering, “Ehm so tyrd. I hay her.” Johnny propped Wade’s elbow, so his hand held up his head, then he saw himself out.
“You make no sense, Wade Fisk. But I’m somewhat glad you’re here.”
There was something graceful about Wade, even obliterated as he was, his long arms draped along the chair. Like a Kennedy. She put a wastebasket next to him and a glass of water on the table, before getting in her own bed. Sometimes they had sex at the house, sometimes they’d drive somewhere, doing it in the back of his Scout. He was more tactical than the other boys she’d been with, as if dialing in the numbers of a combination lock. He’d laughed when she’d told him that, asking if he ought to be offended. “No,” she said. “I just mean you know what you’re doing.” And he’d come back with “Maybe you’ve just never been properly fucked.”
She woke up once to the sound of him vomiting in the bathroom. Then, again, to him kneeling on the floor beside her, whispering, “I’m so sorry,” toothpaste on his breath. She drew the sheets back then, letting him curl behind her, and slip her shorts down, and pull her onto him. Maybe she preferred the backseat of the Scout. Though even there, sometimes, she cried afterward, trying to explain through deep breaths that she was fine—it had gotten easier to piece herself back together, to hide the fissures that sex unearthed. She wasn’t going to tell him about Mommy running away or how Cousin Everett had brought home so much shit there was now one room in the house so full of stuff that they could no longer open the door.
When she woke again, it was to daylight-dappled sheets and a breeze on her skin.
She found Wade outside, leaning against the house. “Feel okay?” she asked. He brought his arm around her. His shirt was off, his skin damp and fragrant. “You showered,” she said.
“I couldn’t get back to sleep.” He kissed her forehead. “Johnny shouldn’t have brought me here.”
“I dunno,” she said, biting her lower lip. “Johnny said you wanted to see me.”
He looked at her. “Who doesn’t want to see Vivian Price?”
“Did you like the picture of us? In ET?”
“Of course,” Wade said. “Did you? June said you’d think—”
“She’s wrong,” Vivian said, stopping him, not wanting to hear about their bickering. She slipped a hand into his jeans thinking that would call him back, but he was staring into the trees. Mommy had wanted those trees removed until the surveyor explained that their roots were all that was holding the hillside together. “What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Not what. Who,” he said, looking down at her. “You’ve got neighbors up there. A real fan club, it turns out.” The same thing Johnny had said.
“I can’t see,” she said. “It’s someone you know?”
“Nah,” he said, looking up again. “Forget I said anything. It’s nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about.”
LITTLE SNAKE, WYOMING MAY 22, 2015
I HANDED THE phone back to Grandad and I went into town. I left Grandad standing there, with the phone in his hand and that look on his face, all the color drained out of him. I drove through Savery and all the way into Baggs. I’d listened on the line and then I’d handed the phone back and all I’d said was “I’m going to town.” I didn’t wait for a response because I couldn’t be there, not one second more. Soon as I turned onto I 70, I saw the storm in the distance. A dark gray cloud and its skirt of rain. I drove past my old school—one school, K through 12, enrollment never topping two hundred—and I kept driving, turning down Route 13, watching in my rearview as the storm turned with me, following me like an apparition. We were the mountains, Mama the rain.
It’s only two miles down the 13 before you hit the Colorado border, but I didn’t get that far. I knew I’d have to go back and when I did I ought to have something for the two of us to eat. I’d say I just went for groceries.
The Passwater General Store is the only thing between Baggs and the Colorado border. It’s a one-room place with a single freezer and a rack of candy bars and another of chips. I used to hoof it there after school, buying ice cream, gum, packets of hot cocoa powder that I ate off the tips of my licked fingers. Like most good things, Aunt Joy had turned me on to it, seeing how I wanted to kick up dust someplace else. Andy Passwater—the owner—had always been at the register. But today he wasn’t there.
“Well, look who’s here,” Mrs. Traden said when I stepped inside.
I’d never seen Mrs. Traden in the Passwater, let alone working the register, and the incongruity of her being there stopped me just inside the door. When my aunt Joy was alive, Mrs. Traden was someone we had over for meals once a week.
“And soaked all the way through!” She was rocked back on the stool and she let the front feet of it clap down like a gavel then and I jumped at the sound. “You okay there?”
The rain had caught up to me as I pulled into the lot, coming down hard as hose water, but I couldn’t make my legs do anything like running, so water was pooling around my shoes. I felt embarrassed, but I couldn’t place about what.
“Charlotte? I asked, are you okay, then?”
Mrs. Traden has called me Charlotte for as long as I can remember and no one, not Mama, not Grandad, not even Aunt Joy, ever corrected her.
“I just got stuck in the rain is all.” My socks sloshed as I tried to escape down the aisle, past the thermoses of coffee, the Doritos. My pulse had kicked in again. Soup, I was thinking. Bread. Get these things and go.
Mrs. Traden and her husband used to own the land our ranch sits on. They’d given Aunt Joy and Grandad their first jobs, raised them up to adults, as Aunt Joy told it. Then Mr. Traden passed and Grandad followed his dreams to California. Mrs. Traden sold the land to Aunt Joy then, for an amount far less than it was worth, out of respect, I guess, for a woman going it on her own. But that bargain left Aunt Joy owing Mrs. Traden meals for all eternity and when she was over, she moved around the kitchen like it still belonged to her, touching the tops of things like we’d done less than a decent job dus
ting.
“Didn’t think I’d see anyone in here today,” Mrs. Traden called down the aisle. “I was just about to call Andy and tell him I was closing up—he’s out with a bronchitis that’ll probably be the death of him. He’s ninety years old, you know? Leave it to Rory’s kid to show up on a day like today. Where is your momma this week, anyway?”
Two cans of soup. The loaf of bread. A bag of coffee beans. I stepped back to the counter. “I’m not a kid anymore,” I said. “I’m twenty-two now.”
When I was a kid, I rode my bike in rain like this, taking the turns as fast and hard as I could, sending water off my tires in a fan, wanting it to be visible to the planes overhead. Mama always flew out of Cheyenne, and in the bitter pit of my thinking about her then, I believed she flew out more often than she flew home, the logic of the math irrelevant.
Until now, until it was true.
“You know your momma’s a hero,” Mrs. Traden said. “She’s probably in Syria, don’t you think? There’s fighting there, I hear.”
“No,” I said to Mrs. Traden. “She was in Ramadi.” I was realizing I had never been alone in a room with Mrs. Traden before. She had always sat opposite me in our kitchen nook, looking at me like she was a decorator making a decision about wallpaper, unsure of my pattern, my quality. “She was supposed to be in Syria. She had been in Syria; that’s where the bureau thought she was. But she took a lead. The fighting was so bad, nobody was going in. I don’t know how they found her, but there was a bomb and she was there. She’s been dead for days.”
Mrs. Traden stood up as quickly as if I’d sunk my teeth into her ankle. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“They called us. Just now. They told us she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. She left her translator and her driver behind. She trusted a bad lead. There were no other American journalists there. Of course, that’s probably why she went, to be the one. The only one. It’ll be in the news. Not until tomorrow. She always put herself in danger. So fucking stupid.” I heard this, the hatred in my voice, and saw the way my hands were shaking, from somewhere outside myself. Mrs. Traden got so quiet I thought she was going to cry. “My name isn’t Charlotte. My name is Charlie,” I said.
“Oh, Charlie,” Mrs. Traden said. “I know. I’ve always known your name is Charlie. I just didn’t—I never cared for the reason why. There’s so many things your momma didn’t get to tell you.” Beyond the excessive makeup Mrs. Traden has always worn, I could see there were things she knew about Mama, things Aunt Joy or Grandad must have said, things that neither of them had ever told me. “You have to ask more questions,” Mrs. Traden said, like some kind of clairvoyant. “You’ve always been such a quiet kid.”
“No,” I said. “Not always.”
If Mama’s camera had been found, if her final pictures could be seen, I know they would be a rapid series of faces, throngs of people trying to go about their lives, and that among them there’d be that person who saw her back, who sensed her looking. A person who desperately wanted their agonies known, desperately enough to strap a bomb to their own body and walk out into a crowded street.
“I have to go,” I told Mrs. Traden. The rain had stopped and pulled up into a dark ceiling, a flash of clear blue sky between here and home. “I’ve been gone too long.”
TOPANGA CANYON, CALIFORNIA EARLY SEPTEMBER 1993
ON THE FIRST day of school, Rory dropped woodshop and went to claim the last open seat in Photo II. She’d heard the teacher loaned a camera to any student who could take apart, thoroughly clean, and reassemble one. The Canon she’d taken to Fresno had proven impossible to fix.
When she’d gotten home from Fresno that night, Gus was waiting up and his eyes went big, seeing her blue ribbon. “Don’t look too surprised,” she’d said. He embraced her—the first time since the accident—but then he started right in about breeding Chap, that he’d thought he would have to sell her, but now! He was a man newly obsessed with an idea. Going on about Carlotta suggesting it, how they’d find an affordable stallion, and in less than a year’s time there’d be a foal. Rory imagined this spindly limbed foal yoked and struggling, dragging them all up out of the hole he’d put them in. She told him that Chap had been in estrus there, but she stopped short of telling him about Cosmo’s Waltz and Journey getting hurt and how she’d been left behind. She recognized he was in need of a certain enthusiasm for this new plan, but what she felt for him, for herself, even for Chap, was a mix of pity and regret. “But you’re okay with it?” he asked, reading her. “It’ll be great,” she said. In ten years, she’d never wanted time away from the barn, but now she was relieved school had begun.
The photo teacher, Mr. Foster, stopped to sign her yellow slip, then returned to clicking through a series of slides on the overhead projector: earth from outer space, Kate Moss in Calvin Klein, Elizabeth Taylor laughing at a party, landscapes that went from the sublime—a mountain’s peak splintering the sun, a stately saguaro cactus—to violent—rice paddies from an open-sided helicopter, bodies strewn on the ground. Foster hesitated, scrutinizing these last few images, before he shut the projector down. Pete Leonard, a green-bean-shaped boy with a lopsided nose that made it impossible for him to say anything without it sounding nasal, asked, “Were you in the army? Did you kill people?”
Foster was potbellied and short with a turnout to his right foot and a gait that suggested he favored one hip. He had not been in the army, he told Pete; he had not killed anyone. But from her seat in the middle row, Rory understood that he had been an embedded journalist in the Korean, no, maybe Vietnam War. Why are you teaching here now, in this crud factory of a school, Rory wanted to know, but she stayed silent.
“Now, what I wanted to talk about,” Foster went on, “is why bother? Why take pictures? What’s the point?”
There was the sound of bodies slinking down in their seats, a pencil drummed a desk. Only Pete Leonard raised his hand. Foster ignored him, looking at Rory, eyebrows raised, clearly wondering would she—the new student—be participating? “Rory?” he asked. “Is that right?”
“Sorry. Yeah, that’s me.” She didn’t ordinarily volunteer anything. “Photographs show us,” she said, her voice low, “I don’t know … where we are.”
At the barn, she’d gone back to her old routines, working horses, forking stalls; whatever friendship—or whatever that was—she’d had with June was over. The few times she had seen Wade there, she’d set her attention that much more intently on the horse she was working. She was returned to who she had been, only now she knew the difference. Just yesterday, Wade had left his saddle in her tack room, on her hobby horse, meaning it was hers to clean.
“And—” Foster was pressing her.
“How we fit in?”
“Interesting,” Foster said, his cheeks drawing down. “Meaning?”
“Meaning …” The front row turned around, their eyes on her. “Meaning how we fit in our lives versus someone else’s life? They can show us how other people live, other ways of being. Photography lets us travel. Kind of.” She was thinking of the images on her bedroom wall, the children in the Bayuda Desert, the bus station in Brussels, but also the newspaper clippings after the Trade Center bomb, the riots in South Central, the old man lying in the street, beaten for being Mexican. “Pictures wake us up. They give us perspective. How we compare.” She flashed on Vivian and Wade on the beach in Malibu, the shiny blue spark of magazine paper. “Of course, plenty of it’s just bull—” She stopped herself, her face going hot.
One of the Goth girls—weighted down with spiked bracelets and a raccoon’s mask of mascara—made a hissing sound, an approving one, Rory realized.
“Yes,” Foster said, “plenty of pictures are just bullshit.” There was snickering and Foster smiled. “In this class, however, we will aim to take pictures that aren’t. Glad to have a live one in here, Rory—”
“It’s Ramos,” Rory said. “Rory Ramos.”
* * *
THE PRIVATE DETECTIVE d
iscovered that Sarah Price had gotten into a town car in the parking lot of Cliffside Refuge and had the driver ferry her forty-five minutes down PCH to Marina del Rey. Marina del Rey being the nexus for all forms of departure (boats slipping from their docks, planes taking off from LAX, and car dealerships glimmering on every corner).
“So she drove right past here,” Vivian said, not so much speaking to the detective as she was realizing it out loud. Mommy in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, in her favorite yellow summer dress, her sunglasses on, sitting at the traffic light at the base of the canyon, avoiding looking up the road toward home.
“That’s correct,” the detective said, not looking at her. He was seated on the opposite side of the kitchen bar, his eyes never leaving Everett, as if he were being paid to look only at him. He’d introduced himself as Detective Gregg, quickly clarifying, “Gregg is my last name.”
Everett was having vodka, olives buried under the ice, and still wearing the blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt he’d worn for the table read of the action movie that morning where he’d had to reassure the producer that his stretch of bad PR was behind him (like chicken pox). “Go on,” Everett said, sounding as scripted as ever.
In Marina del Rey, Sarah told her driver to wait and went into the bank and made a cash withdrawal that was luckily (Gregg’s word) large enough to require the branch manager’s approval. She paid the driver, “tipped him one hundred dollars,” Gregg said, missing the point. “And at the first car dealership in the line of them there, she bought”—Vivian was thinking, used, beige Ford (innocuous, average)—“a used, tan Toyota Camry.” (Damn, so close.) “She spent the night in the house in Big Bear before going northerly. That’s what we know.”
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