The mountains looked indistinguishable, one wrinkled silver pyramid after the next. She wondered if someone raised on them could tell them apart. Surely they could, though by now the ubiquitous peaks would have become invisible, the way the homes on Sylvan Gate Drive were invisible to Maya, though she could say with a moment’s readiness who lived where if only somebody asked. But nobody asked.
Compared to these peaks, the Badlands were scratches in the ground, turned-up earth. But despite her certainty that she would vanish without trace if she dared venture into these mountains — how did one venture into the mountains, as people said? they looked like sheer walls of stone — she could not persuade herself that they were a hostile force. It was so clean up there.
Maya had sooner expected to find Max’s biological parents than to encounter the reaction that she had got from her son to the place he was born: nothing. Max became animated when the Rubins came closest to the rituals of home: oatmeal at the campground, the hotel room, the potatoes. But when she looked at the mountains, it made her believe that some kind of solution was possible to the impasse Max and his family had come into, life before which Maya recalled with difficulty, as if the situation compressed their first eight years together and pitilessly expanded the previous six months. The smallness she felt next to the mountains was the smallness of a young person, a ward, not the smallness of insignificance.
Her next thought was: One day, and perhaps soon, her mother would die. And so would she, and Alex. Even Max. She held these facts placidly; she felt collected and ready. Until it happened, however, she wanted very badly to go at something in a way she had never gone at it before. But what? She could not say. She clucked her tongue. She began flight down so many paths she had not traveled before, and then: dead end.
“Alex, darling, would you pull over?” she said. “Just for a minute.”
“You wanted to get there,” he said, but she knew he would indulge her because she had used the endearment.
Alex clicked the blinker and with a protracted glide came to a halt. Out of town, the roadway had become provisional once again — a bright dotted line bisected the middle, but the lanes were barely wide enough for an SUV and were not marked at the edge of the road, sloping into patchy grass and loose rock below, as if this was as far as the road makers could push out because the landscape couldn’t wait to take over. She knew why Alex disliked pulling over. It drew attention, signified extraordinary circumstances, the machine of their lives in sudden, panicked disarray. He disliked disarray, therefore lived with certainty that it waited at all turns. Or perhaps not: Perhaps he was able to shut his mind of its possibility until Maya forced him into contact with it.
In the few minutes since they’d left the hotel, the temperature had lost ten degrees. She dug in the backseat until she found the blanket Max had used to cover himself two nights before — was it only two nights? The night that preceded her meeting with Marion felt as if it had occurred weeks before, and Marion himself dipped in and out of reality, though she had only to think of lemon balm or cedar or fat Wilfred Shade. Already, those things were taking on the sheen of lost history, foreign experience, nostalgia. For years, she would have the privilege of nostalgia about something she’d savored for twenty-four hours.
Outside, shivering slightly, she leaned against the warm, ticking vehicle and gazed out before her. She breathed deeply — her shortness of breath had gone at some point. The air rushed in with a cold sharp scoring sting, already cold enough that what she breathed out was visible, ghostly and white. She was trying to take in the enormity grandstanding before her; she wanted something that she could take with her. Or were a mountain’s powers unborrowable, lost unless one lived within constant sight of it, some kind of refill occurring with every morning’s first gaze? She laughed at herself. She was the local lunatic. She was the one at whom people would point.
The wind picked up and tugged away the edge of the blanket. She would have let it fly off but that would have brought Alex out of the car to point out the obvious. She felt the slightly hysterical wish to undress, shiver with the wind, rash all over with goose bumps. She wanted to be skinned like a hide, reduced to parts, cut open to the hot glowing center. Or was the soothing blankness she was experiencing the blankness of barrenness, her hot glowing center glowing with nothing? She was forty-two. Forty-three. It was too late, in any case.
She climbed back into the vehicle. Alex said there were tears in her eyes. She snorted. Alex would not ask why she was crying, but also could not go on without alerting her that she was — something that needed her attention, like a spill on the floor. She had always thought that, in a moment like this, this was because he wasn’t interested in the real story. But perhaps it was because he didn’t know how to speak about it, and the observation was as far as he knew how to go.
+
Was the sight of an ’80s-model coffee-and-milk Datsun with the license plate MTRODEO1 in the yard of 2207 New Missouri Trail South Maya’s reward for all her difficult thoughts? All these years, the Datsun had chuffed along somewhere out there. Well, here. It was mounted on a rough-hewn wooden platform, the way you saw sometimes at the car dealership, an unnatural situation for a car, like an animal trapped in a tree. Clearly, it wasn’t being used any longer.
Seeing it, Maya grabbed Alex’s wrist and he squeezed back as he could from the wheel. The long driveway off a rutted side road off 89 gave onto an old country farmhouse with a gouge in one of the walls, as if the place had been bombed, though the garden had a neat fence and the driveway looked freshly graveled. Two dogs stormed out of the house, a runt leaping and barking hysterically and a lean, triangle-headed hound that observed the scene with brambled indifference. Then they gave up and gnawed on pebbles of gravel. The screen door slammed open: a short man with a full belly. He rattled a soda can filled with coins and the dogs trotted back inside, the small one fitting neatly under the legs of the large. They had known each other for some time.
Alex and Maya exchanged looks and stepped out of the vehicle. They were surveyed by the man at the door, his mouth working. It was working them over. He had a copper-colored face as round as a melon, the left eye turned unnaturally in its orbit, the lid half-shut over the eye. Around the mouth was a pelt of goatee neatly clipped and gone white. The blasted eye squinted at them. He looked like a giant bird, grounded.
“Mnyah,” he said to no one in particular.
Alex stepped ahead of Maya. “Excuse me,” he said. “We’re looking for Laurel and Tim. There’s no phone. We tried to call.”
The man whistled. “Who’s asking?”
“We only want to talk to them,” Alex said.
“Please,” Maya said. “It’s a family emergency. Are they inside?”
“You’re their family?” the man said. The good eye rolled up and down.
“We are, in a way,” Maya said.
“We are the parents of the child they gave up,” Alex said. Maya eyed him with gratitude.
The man whistled again. “And they gave you this as their forwarding?”
“It was a closed adoption,” Maya said. “It was the best we could find. We know this isn’t right — but we came anyway.”
The good eye flickered, and he swiveled to regard them with it. “Why?”
“But you know them,” Maya insisted. She half turned toward the old Datsun. “That’s their car. That’s the car in which—” She broke off. “It was registered here. Without a phone number. We would have called.”