My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (27 page)

That was my fault. I forget what confused me, but I led us east on a horse trail, when we should have just trudged up.

We basically walked five miles back the way we came, parallel to the dirt road we'd driven in on, and this is on me.

The dog became horribly annoying the entire trip, running forward and backward and clipping us at the knee every time, enough so that I finally lost my temper with her and directed a blow to her snout when she just about knocked me down at the halfway mark, and we both decided it was time for a coffee break, on a ridge overlooking a deep and staggeringly steep ravine, where Steph sat and undid her own pack, then helped me with mine, and we started a small fire and made that morning's coffee.

It was surprisingly beautiful, even though it was an absolute error, and she sat perched with her feet dangling over the ledge and asked me to take photos of her, using her phone camera, as it was useless for anything else since we were so far out of cellular reach.

She shifted dangerously close to the edge so that we could get her into the same frame as a stone waterfall that loomed directly behind her, if she positioned herself correctly.

It was an actual waterfall formation but in volcanic rock. It went up, into the mountainside, and it cascaded down—frozen in time, because it was rock—right into the ravine, and if you stood back, it looked just like a waterfall that had been transformed into stone, as if by the gorgon Medusa.

It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, made me wonder at the never-ending capacity for metaphor in nature.

And Steph sat there, at its base, on that ridge, and asked me to take her photo, with a look of sadness sliding over her face that was now frozen like rock, as if she knew something that I didn't, or wasn't ready to admit yet, though in reality we were already engaged in it.

On that mountainside. With that dog.

Steph drove the Jeep back to Seattle through the Cascades on our way home the next evening. Driving out of the valley into the mountain pass in the waning daylight felt like an entirely different experience, and though the vestiges of a tingle remained from the omens and danger we had seen and experienced on the camping trip, it was actually an enjoyable journey back through the mountain highways. We were even able to sing loudly over the rush of wind from the lowered windows, though never on key.

Well, my singing was never on key. Hers was always spot on.

Steph had a voice for radio, seductive, warm, sexy, and siren-like, and she could sing even better, when the mood overtook her. She had grown up singing in a singing family, like the Partridges, though not as ginger.

So when she sang, it was a wonderful sound, and she sang a lot on that ride back through the mountains.

And this is where it started, after our guard had lowered.

There came a chime emanating from her handbag, tucked away under camping gear in the backseat, and it was persistent, ringing often enough under the blow of the wind that I had to find it and come to terms with its insistence.

Sixteen messages, from her mother and brother.

I handed her the phone as she was driving and watched her face change as she listened to message after message: her mother crying, then her brother, telling her that her father was in the hospital, where the hell was she? Had she not received the messages? “Call us, as soon as you get this.”

He'd been clearing wood on a piece of land he'd bought for Steph as a present, near a river, in case she wanted to come back home. It was an isolated parcel of land, quite woody and Henry David Thoreau: perfect for her.

He'd taken to spending his weekends clearing trees and shrubs—sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. This time, he'd been out with an old friend and they felled a large tree that had felled him, in return.

He was in ICU and severely hurt. Broken ribs, facial fractures. Uncertain of his survival.

Family had been at his bedside for the past two days, while we'd been out of reach, in that valley of the shadow of neon crucifixions.

She relayed the vital information to me as she heard it, rolled up her windows to get the full messages, and repeated back to me what she was being told in the voice mail.

My startle impulse locked in, and I could see hers forming in the hardening of her features. Finally, she flipped shut her phone and said, “I have to go. I have to be there. He might not make it.”

There was a momentary pause for me, because I wasn't sure what role I played in her life any longer. But it was only a moment, and instead I said, “All right. What do you need from me?”

We were an hour still from Seattle, and closer to her place, which once was our place but was now just her place, so it was there that we headed.

I was beat, I remember. The hike from the day before had been a catastrophe, and we had humped a tremendous amount of gear for nearly eight miles on that trail that paralleled the road we had driven in, and we were effectively stuck in falling temperatures on a roadside that was not amenable to camping.

I finally acknowledged that I was not holding up my part of the covenant of discomfort for camping any longer and wanted a motel room, so I flagged a passing vehicle and was able to get us a ride back to the Jeep, effusively thanking the retired couple who obliged us and were entirely amused at our camping idiocy. (“When you get to the point where you whittle down your toothbrush to save weight and space, then you're ready to carry a pack out camping,” the woman said to me. Steph and I had both brought our Sonicare toothbrushes.)

I'd rented us a musty, moldy, nasty redneck motel and snuck in the dog, and after midnight, when the adjacent bedsprings on either side of the paper-thin walls began squeaking their secrets in a building crescendo, Steph indicated she was interested in doing the same, and it just wasn't there for me, anymore. Normally, the very idea of a motel or hotel would get my crank going: I mean, there's no other reason for hotels, really. They're a structural, physical embodiment of sex. When I was younger, just entering a hotel room would turn me on at the suggestion of possibilities. But here, the chemistry had fizzled out between us, and I felt awful doing it, but I turned my back to her and pretended I was dead asleep, though I was wide awake and crawling with discomfort, itching at the idea of the mildewed sheets, bedbugs, and redneck lovemaking that had transpired in that room previously, lying there with someone for whom I'd lost all romantic affection.

When we reached her place, we did not unpack the Jeep, just rushed inside and began preparations for her departure across the country. While she showered I found her rolling suitcase and began the preparation for travel, thinking perhaps I should accompany her on the trip. It was late afternoon, around 4:00 p.m. when we made it back to Seattle, and she'd be flying into an airport a hundred miles from her hometown and then driving a rental in the middle of the night through some fairly dark and rural highways, and the one highway in particular where she had nearly died fifteen years ago, I knew.

Something in me couldn't allow her to do this on her own. When she emerged from the shower, I said I was going along; she shouldn't do this alone. I could do my job from any hotel room with an Internet connection; it didn't matter where. “So let's get you home.”

Her features softened, and she looked me square in the eye, nodded her head.

“All right,” she said. “I would like that.”

By 5:00 the next morning, we were driving from a small airport to a medium-size city on the East Coast where her father had been hospitalized. It had been touch-and-go for the first eighteen hours, but he was a tough dude, had stabilized and seemed to be pulling through, the reports began to reflect as we flew over the flyover states.

She'd put both tickets on her card and I'd given her the daily cash limit on my withdrawals, which covered my ticket. We agreed that she'd cover the car rental and hotels while I'd pick up all the food costs because I didn't eat like her, peanut butter and Cheez-Its and a cup of coffee satisfying most nutritional requirements for days at a stretch, and this seemed fair to both of us, since it was her crisis, her family.

It was around 6:00 a.m. when we arrived at the hospital. She had paused for a moment in the car and allowed herself to break down, to shiver and shake and cry and steel herself for what was about to come, seeing her dad hurt, being thrust back into the miasma of family dynamics that had been painful enough for her to put ten states between them and her, and the corresponding micromemories.

The car had bucket seats, so it was difficult to hold her, but I did, awkwardly and painfully over the console, as she shivered through her process and then resolved herself to plant her feet and attend to what was asked of her.

It was still early enough in the morning that the hospital was quiet and there was little going on, so we were able to slip inside and find his room. Her dad was sleeping. Her mother and brother were curled up in back-pinching discomfort in the waiting room, and I recognized them right away, as I wandered out to find some coffee in order to give her a moment alone with her father. He was a good guy, and I was deeply saddened to see him like that.