Range of Light (15 page)

I could tell Kath didn't appreciate the comparison to Lou. She stared down at tumbling, bubbling water. I had no idea what had taken hold of me.

“Perhaps I need to be quiet awhile,” I tried again. “Do you mind if we eat lunch sans conversation?”

“No,” Kath agreed with alacrity. “Two sandwiches. Hold the talking.”

I laughed.

“We'll just put the fanny pack here and make our lunch.”

She sliced half the tomato and spread avocado on the bread. Neatly, she cut two pieces of cheese and lay them side by side, then handed me the sandwich.

“I'm sorry.” I was mortified, confused, penitent, still aggravated. “It's just that you remind me of Sari sometimes.” My need to talk was as strong as the hunger for solitude a minute ago.

“Sari?” Kath asked softly.

“She was always solicitous like this, of me, of Mother, Father, everyone, actually, everyone except herself …” My eyes filled.

“You know, we've never really talked about Sari,” Kath offered slowly. “I was camping in Canada when it happened. When you came back for the funeral. I didn't hear about it for months.”

I looked away. Through the blur of my tears, white rocks on the opposite shore looked like grazing sheep. I didn't know why I had brought up Sari, what was wrong with me today.

“You must still miss her,” Kath said.

“You could have sent a card.” The old rage swelled.

“I didn't have your address back East.”

“That would have been easy enough to locate.” I studied her bewildered face. “You could have sent it in care of my parents. Or called them for the address.”

“Yes.” Kath hung her head. “I could have done that. Should have done that. I know. I'm sorry.” She sat up straight and tried to meet my glance. “After all this time is it still appropriate to apologize?” Her voice choked.

Cry, Kath, I wanted to say. I had needed her at the funeral to weep and rage with me.

“Or maybe it's too late?”

“Oh, no.” I shook my head, impressed by how deeply, after fifteen years, I still needed to hear her regret. I gulped.

“I am sorry. Have been sorry for a long while. Will you forgive me?”

Seas of time washed between us.

Overwhelmed with sadness, gratitude, relief, I realized this late apology was not too late. I spoke rapidly to stay composed. “A lot of people don't know how to handle death. You were young, we both were, and Sari five years younger.”

“Do you feel like telling me about it? About what you know?”

“I don't know what I know. She was only twenty-four. So talented. And brave to be doing her music, getting her performance degree while locked up in the same house with our bitter, disappointed mother.”

I stared at the falls, wanting to lie beneath them, to sleep, to forget this conversation I had stupidly started.

“Oh, I can't blame Mother. Perhaps it was my fault. If I hadn't gone East, safe from my parents' reach—almost safe—Sari would have got a lot less pressure from them.”

“Pressure?” Kath had finished her sandwich and frowned at my untouched lunch.

“To be the perfect daughter—artistic, well-married, affluent, beautiful. Sari fell for all of it, perhaps in part to compensate for my failure.”

“Your failure!”

“Well, I gave up art, didn't I?—as you, yourself, warned me not to do. And I moved to the other side of the country. Hard to be your parents' handmaiden from that distance. Everything fell to Sari.”

Kath touched the sandwich to my lips. I took it and had a bite. Imagined the blood sugar rushing to my head. That was better.

“Sari had choices, too,” she said. “She could have gone, well, with your family's money, she could have gone to
Japan
.”

I set aside my lunch. “It wasn't the money. How can I expect you to get it when after years of therapy I still don't understand, really?”

“Years of therapy.” Kath took a moment to absorb this.

It was hard to believe I was rattling on amid all this natural glory; I tried to reenter it, watching the sun dappling the lichen on the rock next to me, the clouds edging eastward in the midafternoon sky.

“But Sari was making up for my defection. It wasn't just Mother who wanted the family close by. Father had moved to start his tribe. Here I was returning back East—and to Massachusetts—where his great-grandfather had immigrated from Glasgow, shoveling horseshit in the street. Granted my dad's family prospered, but Father thought he outwitted the ghosts by moving to California. And I took his lineage backward.”

“It's a little convoluted.” Kath squinted. “I'm beginning to see why your mom took all those pills.”

I nodded. “Millions of middle-class women did in the 1950s, of course. She was just another housewife with the perfect home whose ‘nervous condition' interfered with her appreciation of nirvana.”

I knew I sounded like an academic twit, but it helped me to put Mother's story into a larger frame. Somehow, that way, it seemed as if there might be solutions, somehow I didn't feel so guilty.

Kath looked regretfully at my sandwich.

“That's how Sari died, you know.”

Kath shook her head.

“Pills.”

“Your mother's pills?”

“Her own, her own doctor, her own generation, her own condition. The same pills.”

“Oh, Adele!” Kath took my hand and in doing so knocked the sandwich off my pack onto the ground.

I closed my eyes and waited, anticipating the promise of days ahead of us as I hadn't in years. That was enough. For the first time in two decades I could say, “for now,” because I had begun to believe that there might be some future, that there was a chance of catching up, of comprehending, of forgiving. I released Kath's hand, leaned against the warm rock and allowed tears to stream across my face.

When I sat up, I found Kath brushing off the sandwich. “You've gotta eat. As Mom would say, you have to eat a pound of dirt before you die.”

“I always liked your mom. Your whole family. They were so sane.”

Kath put a hand on my shoulder and gave me the sandwich.

I took a deep breath, then bit into the bread. “Hmmmm, yes, I am hungry. That was a long walk.”

Kath laughed. “Country air!”

“See, practical. I know your family wasn't easy, Kath, but they were, I don't know, better endowed with common sense.”

I watched her body tighten. “Better endowed, maybe, but I'm not sure how much they used it outside of issuing homey wisdom about dirt and fresh air.”

I had finished the sandwich and was peeling an orange. “I don't know. Things in your family don't seem as complicated.”

Her jaw clenched. “That's because you were related to the people in your family and not to those in mine.”

I didn't believe this, but knew I had wandered into dangerous country. “You have a point there.”

Kath sucked on the orange and nodded.

Newly infused with energy, I
felt eager to get to Glen Aulin, to set up our tent so we might take a late afternoon hike to Waterwheel Falls. But Kath clearly needed to unfold. It was pleasant here, stretched out by the water with my oldest friend in the world. I had known—and loved—Kath longer than any living person except Father. Kath had been in my life since I was ten, nine years longer than Lou, nine formative years. She had been a sister—clearly closer than Sari because we were the same age. No, it was more than that. We had always gotten along, had always shared interests: gossiping about boys, Red Cross volunteering, debates over international politics, hikes in the wilderness. We had always been able to talk about anything, yet we were different enough. Tall and short. Dark and light. One from a crazy, upper-middle-­class family; one from a much more down-to-earth home. Mutt and Jeff, Kath's mother used to say in that charming Québecois accent. I had once thought I would marry Kath if she had been a man. And it was Kath's presence I had missed most at my wedding. Ah, that was all over; it was decades ago. Right now I was simply thankful that we had
this
time together. And grateful that our other friends had not come to the Sierra.

Dangling my feet in the water again, I enjoyed the sharp, almost painful cold. I closed my eyes and fantasized spending the whole afternoon here.

Then I heard myself asking as suddenly as sun escapes past clouds, boldly reopening the day, “So how is your romantic life these days?” There, I was initiating the discussion again. As much as I resented this inevitability, my longing to be close and honest with Kath—as well as my now almost unbearable curiosity—won out.

“Quiet,” she said.

I waited.

She watched the water rush in front of us.

“There isn't anyone?” I tried again.

“Nope.”

“Since when?”

“Oh, a while. I broke off with someone two summers ago.”

“What was her—his—name?”

“Anita.” She looked at me directly.

“Nice name.” I smiled.

“Nice woman.”

“So do you feel like telling me about her?”

“Do I have a choice?” She laughed.

“Yes.”

I heard about their years together in Oakland, their vacations, Anita's desire to have a baby, Kath's reluctance, Anita's new lover, the breakup, Kath's loneliness. I felt sad for Kath and even for Anita, yet relieved in some unsettling way.

Silence took over as we soaked up the sun.

The noise was slight, perhaps it was a motion rather than a noise. Whatever occurred was enough to startle me. I looked down to find a snake—a harmless garter snake, I knew the moment I saw it—winding up the rocks, and my sudden gasp was involuntary.

“What is it?” Kath sat up.

“Nothing,” I said. “Only a benign reptilian visitor.”

The snake coiled against a nearby rock. Benign or not, it gave me the creeps.

“Guess we're intruding.” I shrugged.

“Maybe we should go,” Kath said. “Especially if we want to walk to Waterwheel Falls. I don't know why I'm feeling so lazy today.”

Downhill from Tuolumne Falls to Glen Aulin. I hated this kind of steep descent. I much preferred uphill, where you could feel your lungs filling and your muscles stretching. Here progress required an almost mincing gait in which the whole body poised against catastrophe, tense and therefore likely to be damaged with an abrupt slide or twist, particularly in the sleek aftermath of yesterday's storm. The unfamiliar weight of the pack added extra stress to my back, my balance. Step by careful step, the trail had been intricately constructed from white rocks with the skill of Renaissance stonemasons. I imagined working here in the rain, covered with mud, dying of chill. The sight of fresh mule shit reminded me the pack animals had made it safely.

We wouldn't be going to Glen Aulin if Nancy had come on the trip. She probably wouldn't have made it to Tuolumne Falls with her weight. And Paula would be talking nonstop along the trails. Our energetic friend was always trying something new—jazz piano these days. She inevitably had something to say. And to ask. She wasn't like some vapid, boring talkers, like Lou's mother, for instance. Paula simply liked to engage; she was constantly on. In that way, she was the opposite of Kath. I knew Kath was fond of Paula, however, I wondered if it had been Paula's patter that had sent Kath on those solitary hikes years ago. I remembered being annoyed at the ease with which Kath simply left us—left me with the rest of them. All the same, I had admired her independence. Donna was obviously being driven bonkers by Nancy's obsession with fashion magazines and makeup. I smiled, remembering Nancy's clothing monologues. What
had
happened to Donna? Kath had said something oblique about her being into street drugs, but we had gotten sidetracked. Was she homeless? Had she gotten clean and sober and taken off for India? Walnut Creek? I would ask more about Donna tonight. And maybe we would also talk more about Anita.

The Glen Aulin High Sierra
Camp nested
at the foot of White Cascade, which thundered into a shallow caldron.

I could hear Kath's steady
tread
behind me. 2:00 P.M. We had made it in decent time, so we would be able to get to Waterwheel Falls and back by dark.

“Let's have a drink here,” Kath said, nodding to a small building.

It was covered in the same white canvas as the tent cabins. I was glad we were backpacking. Imagine spending fifty dollars a night to sleep dormitory style with strangers.

I followed her, realizing how thirsty I was.

“They usually have lemonade in the office here—for people in the executive suites.”

“Sounds good.”

We unloaded our backpacks before entering.

“Feel like I'm removing a vital organ,” I said, releasing the weighty pack. “Like when I had the boys. You get used to being pregnant, to the extra space you take up in the world.”

“Yes, but what a relief.” Kath stretched her arms behind her back.

“Hmmm, relief, yes, mostly that.”

Six or seven hikers were hanging out at the desk, waiting to buy candy bars or get directions or stabilize their pulses. Kath didn't pay much attention to them.

“Lemonade?” She steered me to the large, beige plastic dispenser.

“Yes, please.”

Parched, I consumed two cups. Then I refilled my cup and drank more slowly, staring outside at the cascade.

“Maybe we could spend the afternoon in camp reading … or talking,” Kath said.

“Well, that's one idea.”

Behind us, someone was talking about Waterwheel Falls. I turned and could tell from his broad shoulders and his straw hat that this was the man from the vista. Sandy.

Kath pulled a face. “Guess we should go, if we want to find a decent campsite.”

“Oh, do you mind waiting a sec?” I asked. “I'm dying for a chocolate bar.”