“Late-season groups are my favorite,” Rose Holliver said. “This is the time to see it.” Her chest was shapeless in a many-pocketed worsted forest-green shirt, her belly hemmed in by coarse gray slacks with black piping. The strap from her broad-brimmed gray hat accentuated the downy ampleness of her chin, the cinch making Maya think of horses and bits. Where did Rose Holliver come upon love in this emptiness? Or was there a man who joined her in the modest trailer they shared in a residential development nearby after his own day working at something for the national park? They fried hamburgers, on special nights they had merlot from the store. They had a half collie that had appeared one day and had been seduced into staying by leftover hamburger bits. In the evenings they watched the same television shows that Alex and Eugene watched, and they even paid a fee to the neighborhood association for electricity and water. Was their life so different? What difference did location make if they got along and liked the same things — she fried; he washed up after they finished. Maya had come ready to find savages, desperate characters, the poor, but there was no savagery. It was nice between Rose and (Trent? Charlie?), it was close, the shaggy collie watching the two lovers until they stopped and had a laugh over the dog’s watching. They didn’t smoke after sex. They didn’t have children, and probably wouldn’t. (Whereas Maya was forty-two but looked thirty-two, Rose looked forty-two but was thirty-two: she was the fertile one.) They had the pup. They called him Anna. Like Santa Anna, not like a girl.
Rose was giving out information about the Badlands: It looked like hopeless rock, but two-thirds was actually grass prairie. Maya was gratified by the information: It answered her earlier question. “You could run a herd of cattle on here if you wanted,” Rose said. Maya pulsed Max’s hand. They were on a mile-long boardwalk that led from the visitor center to an overlook down on a hundred-mile ridge of striated stone that ran all the way into Nebraska. Nebraska! To Maya, the word was as exotic as Neptune, and yet Maya stood within sight of it. Actually faced, it seemed unfamiliar and ordinary all at once.
Max looked up at Maya. “Grass, Max,” Maya said, and nodded encouragingly. But he gave no reaction.
Rose was counting on her fingers, the thumbs male in their thickness: “Some of the last wildflowers you’ll see before we get this freeze in the next couple of days: prickly pear, prairie coneflower, needle and thread, sideoats grama. .”
After the dim glass cases of the visitor center, the wood-etched signage around the park, and the shit-brown bathroom stalls that followed their progress down the boardwalk, the names of the grasses were beautiful. Sideoats grama sounded like a Negro jazz act. Maya wanted to know who got to name them. Even though the seniors were regularly interrupting the lecture, calling out “Ranger Holliver?” with happy compliance, Maya was too shy to raise her hand. Max might know, she thought, but he was refusing to become involved.
Rose was on to the animal life. Two small birds, black knobby heads and torsos like white eggs, were bouncing on the upper rail of the fence separating the visitors from the wilderness. “Little tuxedoes they’ve got on,” Rose said. The birds had a hot-turquoise cummerbund on each flank — nature’s bid for grace and surprise amid the universe’s black-and-white plodding. “Who can tell me who these little guys are?” Rose said. “Your prize is a refund on your tour ticket.” The retirees grumbled with laughter — the tour was free. Maya knelt in front of Max: “Max, honey, do you know what kind of bird that is?” Someone said butcher-bird. No, a flycatcher. “It’s just a magpie,” he whispered. Maya leaped to her feet. “We know!” she exclaimed. The retirees swiveled and gazed admiringly down on the young mother with the fair-haired boy. “Now this apple did fall far from the tree,” a tall man with watery eyes said. Chuckles murmured through the group. “I’d give a dollar to be your age, young naturalist. The bottom dollar.”
Maya, stung by the first comment, was placated by the second. “Tell them, honey,” Maya said, looking down at Max. But her son stepped a half foot behind her and dropped her hand. Rose and the retirees waited. “Max,” Maya hissed. “Magpie.” He turned and faced away from the group. Maya colored. She looked back at the seniors and swallowed. “We’re shy today,” she said apologetically, wondering if her accent was coming through. What had seemed unimpeachable emerging from Max’s mouth felt like an embarrassing guess from her own. “Magpie?”
“You got it,” Rose said. The gallery went up in cheers. “Sometimes the simple answer’s the right one, folks, that was the lesson on that one,” Rose said, and the retirees banged their walking sticks on the boardwalk in agreement as they touched off again, play in the boards after a summer’s use.
Maya knelt again and took Max by the shoulders. “Max, what’s going on? Are you warm? Cold?” She touched his forehead.
“Where’s Papa?” he said.
“Papa’s with the map. Do you want to go back? I can try to get him on the cell phone.”
“When we go on vacation, we go to the beach. This isn’t vacation.”
“When your dad and grandma and grandpa go on vacation, you go to the beach,” Maya said. “I like different places to go on vacation. When you grow up, you can choose your own. Don’t you like it?” She motioned toward the outcroppings of striped sandstone before them, now looking like a horse’s head, now a marzipan cookie, now a hand clasping a cane. How rapidly the otherworldly magnificence of the sight ceased to seem otherworldly. But it remained magnificent. Maya wondered how such a barren, howling emptiness could fail to fill a watcher with fright; she felt light-headed, though not exactly with fright. Not barren, either — Rose Holliver’s mission was to make the group understand that the stony hills teemed with life. You just had to know how to see. Maya marveled at the rookie pleasure she’d taken in the nondescript elevation they’d seen in the morning, an immigrant marveling at the bounty of the corner grocery when the supermarket awaited. She thought to make a game of divining the shapes of the buttes, but her son did not look interested.
“Do you want to stop?” she said.
He shrugged.
“Just give it a chance,” Maya said. “For me.”
They banged the planks in pursuit of the seniors. Maya told herself to calm down. She heard Alex — she was frantic, and doing her best to make sure her son was, too. In the harsh clarity of the surroundings, she saw herself harshly and clearly: She spent her days waiting for ill news of her son, and had now set to demanding it. Her fright was so pervasive that it was no longer exceptional; its absence was exceptional. But she had not felt its absence since the day he ran off to the creek. Was she turning into a hypochondriac like a good Rubin? They lived in expectation of danger and setback, even walked accordingly, a slight stoop in deference to the axe that would swing. She hated herself for always trying to hold the Rubins responsible.
After Max had vanished in June, Maya gave twenty nights to racking dreams involving a gang of small, malevolent boys peering into the glass on either side of the front door of the house — urinating on the doorframe, banging on the glass, sticking their tongues out, though never attempting to enter. Sometimes, in the dream, she confronted them — so large was her fury that once she leaped from the second story down to the foyer, a drop of ten feet. This scattered them from the window, but her sleep remained fitful. When it worked, she dreamed of the boys. The only way to stop the dream was to wake up, but then she was up at three thirty, four, a wreck at the hospital, misplacing plates and X-raying the wrong breast.