In the morning Lily lay in bed and watched the sun stretch over the quilt and onto the skin of her arms and her hands. She looked around the room. The bed was narrow and had a headpiece made of iron. A pattern of small pink flowers papered the walls. On the bookcase next to the bed a china lady held a china umbrella with one hand and extended the other, palm up, to see if the rain had stopped. There were books. Beauty’s Secret, one of them said on the spine. Lily opened it, but it turned out to be about horses.
A full-length mirror hung on the back of the bedroom door. Lily didn’t notice until the sunlight touched its surface, doubling in brightness. She rose and stood in front of it, backlit by the sunny window, frontlit by the mirror so that she could hardly see. She leaned in closer. Last night’s crying had left her eyes red and the lids swollen. She looked at herself for a long time, squinting and changing the angle. Who was she? There was absolutely no way to tell.
The smell of coffee came up the stairs and through the shut door. Lily found her clothes on the desk chair where she had left them. She put them on: stockings, a fuchsia blouse, an eggshell business suit, heels. She used the bathroom, someone else’s hairbrush as well as someone else’s toothbrush, and came downstairs.
“You can’t go hiking dressed like that,” Mattie told her, and of course Lily couldn’t. “You have nothing else? What size shoe do you wear? A six and a half? Six? Tiny little thing, aren’t you? Katherine might have something that will do.” She raised her voice. “Katherine? Katherine!”
Katherine came through the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, drying her hands on a dish towel. She was somewhat younger than Mattie though older than Lily, middle forties, perhaps, and heavier, a dark-skinned woman with straight black hair. On request she produced jeans for Lily, a sleeveless T-shirt, a red sweatshirt, gray socks, and sneakers. Everything was too big for Lily. Everything was wearable.
Mattie took her through the screen door and out the back porch after breakfast. Beyond the edge of Mattie’s sprinklers, the lawn stopped abruptly at a hill of sand and manzanita. Mattie had stowed a lunch and a canteen in a yellow day pack. She began to help Lily into it. “You go up,” Mattie said. “All the way up. And then down. You can see the trail from the other side of the fence. Watch for rattlers. You hiked much?” Lily was having trouble slipping her left arm under the second strap. It caught at the elbow, her arm pinned behind her. Mattie eased the pack off and began again.
“Oh, yes,” Lily assured her. “I’ve hiked a lot.” Mattie looked unconvinced. “I’m a rock climber,” said Lily. “That’s the kind of hiking I’m used to. Crampons and ropes and mallets. I don’t usually wear them on my back. I wear them on my belt. I take groups out. Librarians and schoolteachers and beauticians. You know.”
“Well, there’s just a trail here,” said Mattie doubtfully. “I don’t suppose you can get into trouble as long as you stay on the trail. Your shoes don’t really fit well. I’m afraid you’ll blister.”
“I once spent three days alone in the woods without food or shelter and it snowed. I was getting a merit badge.” The day pack was finally in place. “Thank you,” Lily said.
“Wait here. I’m going to get some moleskin for your feet. And I’m going to send Jep along with you. Jep has a lot of common sense. And Jep knows the way. You’ll be glad of the company,” Mattie told her. She disappeared back into the house.
“It was in Borneo,” Lily said softly, so that Mattie wouldn’t hear. “You want to talk about blisters. You try walking in the snows of Borneo.”
Jep turned out to be a young collie. One ear flopped over in proper collie fashion. One pointed up like a shepherd’s. “I’ve heard some nice things about you,” Lily told him. He followed Lily out to the gate and then took the lead, his tail and hindquarters moving from side to side with every step. He set an easy pace. The trail was unambiguous. The weather was cool when they started. In an hour or so, Lily removed her sweatshirt and Jep’s tongue drooped from his mouth. Everyone felt good.
The sun was not yet overhead when Lily stopped for lunch. “Eleven twenty-two,” she told Jep. “Judging solely by the sun.” Katherine had packed apple juice and cold chicken and an orange with a seam cut into the peel and a chocolate Hostess cupcake with a cream center for dessert. Lily had not seen a cupcake like that since she had stopped taking a lunch to school. She sat with her back against a rock overhang and shared it with Jep, giving him none of the cream filling. There was a red place on her left heel, and she covered it with moleskin. Jep lay on his side. Lily felt drowsy. “You want to rest awhile?” she asked Jep. “I don’t really care if we make the caves, and you’ve seen them before. I could give a damn about the caves, if you want to know the truth.” She yawned. Somewhere to her left a small animal scuttled in the brush. Jep hardly lifted his head. Lily made a pillow out of Katherine’s red sweatshirt and went to sleep, leaning against the overhang.
When she woke, the sun was behind her. Jep was on his feet, looking at something above her head. His tail wagged slowly and he whined once. On the ground, stretching over him and extending several more feet, lay the shadow of a man, elongated legs, one arm up as though he were waving. When Lily moved away from the overhang and turned to look, he was gone.
It unsettled her. She supposed that a seasoned hiker would have known better than to sleep on the trail. She turned to go back to Mattie’s and had only walked a short way, less than a city block, when she saw something she had missed coming from the other direction. A woman was painted onto the flat face of a rock which jutted up beside the trail. The perspective was somewhat flattened, and the image had been simplified, which made it extraordinarily compelling somehow. Especially for a painting on a rock. When had Lily ever seen anything painted on a rock other than KELLY LOVES ERIC or ANGELA PUTS OUT? The woman’s long black hair fell straight down both sides of her face. Her dark eyes were half closed; her skin was brown. She was looking down at her hands, which she held cupped together, and she was dressed all in red. Wherever the surface of the rock was the roughest, the paint had cracked, and one whole sleeve had flaked off entirely. Lily leaned down to touch the missing arm. There was a silence as if the birds and the snakes and the insects had all suddenly run out of breath. Lily straightened and the ordinary noises began again. She followed Jep back down the trail.
“I didn’t get to the caves,” she admitted to Mattie. “I’ll go again tomorrow. But I did see something intriguing: the painting. The woman painted on the rock. I’m used to graffiti, but not this kind. Who painted her?”
“I don’t know,” said Mattie. “She’s been here longer than I have. We get a lot of farm labor through, seasonal labor, you know. I always thought she looked Mexican. And you see paintings like that a lot in Mexico. Rock Madonnas. I read somewhere that the artists usually use their own mother’s faces for inspiration. The writer said you see these paintings by the roadside all the time and that those cultures in which men idolize their mothers are the most sexist cultures in the world. Interesting article. She’s faded a lot over the years.”
“You don’t often see a Madonna dressed in red,” Lily said.
“No, you don’t,” Mattie agreed. “Blue usually, isn’t it?” She helped Lily out of the pack. “Did you get blisters?” she asked. “I worried about you.”
“No,” said Lily, although the spot on her heel had never stopped bothering her. “I was fine.”
“You know who might be able to tell you about the painting? Allison Beale. Runs the county library but lives here in Two Trees. She’s been here forever. You could run over tonight and ask her if you like. I’ll give you the address. She likes company.”