Outside awaited a brilliant cold. The corset around her rib cage was replaced by a knife blade. No, something blunter: a dull stone wedged where no stone should go. The hospital had rid her of hypochondria, but the hospital was in New Jersey, and if someone told her that health issues worked differently here — at three thousand feet, zero population, and walls of Oligocene rock — she wouldn’t have argued.
The air drizzled her arms with invisible needles. Was that not a symptom of strokes? She lifted her hands imploringly — there was only so much she could be asked to lose her mind about. If she needed to be felled by a heart attack, two days shy of forty-three, amid this splendor and squalor, so be it. If health issues worked differently here, accountability could work differently also. As in: she abdicated it.
She gulped the air — an unfamiliar taste — and sent it back out in swirling white gusts, the silence roaring in her ears like a hard wind. It was more than a person could take in all at once: the black mirror of the sky shaking with stars, the charging air, the din of the silence. Maya’s head swam, a black rose unfurling under her forehead, but she didn’t want to return to the tent. The raw air was doing work on her dread. It had been working through her since well before sleep — since she had watched the sun sink behind the warped landscape like a mother driving away. The fear was greater inside the tent than outside, the thing finally faced. She was surprised to discover the darkness less complete out here: the dull fluorescent green of an overhead lamp pointing the way to the bathrooms cut into the icy black gleam. She squinted into the darkness, wondering if it would reveal the shape of a man, but there was nothing. Belatedly, it occurred to her that a camper other than Marion might be out for fresh air. Her thinking was holed in critical ways that would not have eluded her attention at home. It was an exhausting, hopeless feeling.
She sank to the ground, crossing her legs under her knees, and closed her eyes. It was hard to do for more than a second — the dread closed in once again. She popped them open. A graveyard stillness, just the handful of tents scattered across the campground, squatters on the infertile plain of an alien planet. But she tried once more, for a second longer. Then again, for a second more still. Her eyes were becoming used to the darkness, which was changing to a bruised violet. After her next try, she saw the orange point of a cigarette hanging in the murk like a miniature fruit. She made out Marion’s faint outline by a picnic table twenty feet away. Her heart leaped, and she lifted a weak hand. It really was as if she had conjured him.
He wore a heavy plaid shirt that looked warm, properly warm for the weather. A gust of wind cuffed her shoulders; she wished she had brought her shawl, but she couldn’t return now. He waved at her and moved from his place. They walked toward each other until they met at two old juniper stumps that belonged to no tent. Even now, probably years after being sawed down, they gave off a faint hint of cedar.
They said hello and stood shyly by the stumps until Marion pointed at them with the tip of his cigarette and they sat. They watched the rock beyond the edge of the campground, the cigarette’s orange point circling the air like a moth. He said nothing, only moved the cigarette in a line from his mouth to his side and then back. After a minute, it fell to the ground, where his boot ground it.
“I don’t think I’ve spent so much time outside in my life,” Maya said. “I have a headache,” she added cautiously, wanting to know was there something to worry about, but unwilling to tempt truly bad news by revealing the extent of her discomfort.
“Oxygen headache,” Marion said. “I couldn’t wait to get back here when we’d go see Clarissa’s family out east.”
She was stung to have been offered his wife’s name so cavalierly. Well, Marion had got the picture when she had told him she and Max weren’t alone. Again, she saw that he was older. A good ten years older than her; in his early fifties.
“You speak about it as if she left you,” Maya said. “But Alma said you left.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Most people take a while to recall which one is Alma and which one is Celia. They don’t help — they wear nearly the same thing. They’re only a year apart. I think they’re shoring each other up.”
“It was difficult for them,” Maya ventured.
He shrugged — with uncertainty, not indifference. “They seemed fine. They approved. At least Alma did. Because they know something’s wrong before you do. It took a while to understand there was more going on. Little things, like Celia’s pig was so hot last summer, but Celia didn’t see it. I had to tell her to hose her down. And she just said, ‘Oh.’” Marion saw Maya’s face and smiled. “She’s in the animal husbandry program at the school. She was going to be a rancher. Maybe not the first female ranch head in Fall River County, but close to it. At six years old, she would have had a hose on that pig in a second.”
“She changed her mind?” Maya said.
“She’s up in the air, she says,” Marion said. “That’s what she says, ‘up in the air.’ It makes me think of her as a kid, I’m throwing her up in the air, and she’s squealing. But this is a different ‘up in the air.’ I wonder if I did that. If I messed with my kid’s certainty.”
“Have you spoken about it?”
“She doesn’t want to. They’re quiet, the girls, actually — I know you wouldn’t think so. Celia more so. Because they heard their mother and me splashing it out year after year and now they are going to keep it zipped at all costs? Some other reason they themselves don’t know? And if they don’t know, I’m supposed to know because I’m the parent? The books don’t say anything, and I don’t have the spleen to go see a therapist.” He kicked the heels of his boots against the ground one by one, the hardpan giving out a dull echo.
“Maybe I want to go just to get my exoneration,” he said. “‘It wasn’t you, Mr. Hostetler. Your daughters are not going to spend their lives closed up because they don’t want to turn out self-indulgent like Daddy.’ There’s a fellow in Spearfish they say is a miracle worker. Retiree from New York. The East Coast gets them when they’re young and unproven, and we get them when they’ve been stocking professional wisdom for fifty years. I’d say you have the losing end of the bargain.”
“I used to think psychologists worked with mentally sick people,” Maya said. “But then we went to someone to help Max, and even though he didn’t help Max — even though he proved Alex’s point, I guess — for some reason I became more open to it.”
“What’s wrong with Max?” Marion said.
She traced her own shapes on the hardpan. She liked hearing him say her son’s name; it came out differently. Unable to sleep in heavy shoes despite being outside, she was wearing flats on heavy wool socks. She was really going for elegance every chance that she got.
“I am filled with nervous energy,” she said. “I can’t focus. I feel like I’m going to make a mistake. Actually, I felt that long before coming here. In truth, I feel safer here. I should be more afraid, and then I realize I’m not.” She looked over at him. “I sound crazy, I know.”
“I don’t mind it,” he said.
“It’s different for you because you’ve been here many times. You’ve been here many times, haven’t you?”
He nodded.
“There’s more than one campground, isn’t there?”
“Guilty,” he said.
She laughed sharply into the night. “I don’t mind it.”
They sat silently for some time. “I’ll tell you about my son,” she said, “and you tell me about Wilfred and Carla.”
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re shivering. Take my shirt. There’s some hot tea in this thermos. With whiskey in it.” He spread his shirt over her shoulders — she smelled woodsmoke and a faint hint of dried sweat, but the dried sweat of activity rather than inactivity — unscrewed the cap of his thermos and poured. Maya inhaled something like grass bleached by the sun. “There’s some lemon balm over there,” he said, pointing. “Strained through the nicest sock that I’ve got. Nicest clean sock.” The seat of the thermos unscrewed to make a second cup, and he filled it with tea for himself. “A thermos for making friends,” he said.