Slow. Measured. Sibilant. And unidentifiable as animal, or human. I reached out of the folds of the sleeping bag, found the flashlight and the Mace, wrapped my hands around their familiar shapes. I slowed my own breathing to almost nothing as I waited for whatever was outside to make a move. It never did. I must have fallen asleep waiting. And in the bright light of morning I told myself it was a dream, despite what I was still holding in my hands.
I didn’t let myself go home early. I decided I was being paranoid and skittish and making way too much out of less than nothing. After all, it couldn’t have been him, he didn’t even have a car, and I could just avoid the places we’d been together. Not a problem. I took my overblown reactions to our dinner and the sounds in the night as clear signs that, regardless of the slight awakening responses of my body, in no way was I ready for actually dealing with anything resembling dating. So I turned for comfort to the heat-washed hills, and headed further and further out every day. I found rocks slick with desert polish, found pathways between high, sculptured walls, orange- and rose-colored, carved by waters that rose and flooded whatever was in their paths and then vanished, all in the space of a day. Water that left hard rock shaped like those vanished waves, rising, almost touching overhead, blocking out all but thin, changing bars of sunlight. Rock formations that became deadly mazes if thunderstorms rose to the north, beyond the horizon, beyond sight and hearing, their clouds breaking open and sending floodwaters racing into these perfect, beautiful traps. I went far enough to find places without people. Sometimes there was a car pulled up near mine when I got back to the trailhead, though I never saw the other hikers.
But I wasn’t sleeping worth a damn. When sleep did come, after overvigilant listening for creeping sounds that I knew weren’t actually there, the nightmares came. Except they weren’t nightmares. They were real, or what had been real, too many times. I thought I’d left behind that scared, obedient, defeated person I’d been with my husband. I was wrong, apparently. For Stephen rose back up out of the ground every night, and I let him into my dreams and let him tell me, and prove to me, again and again, how very, very worthless I was. I believed those dreams enough that every morning, under the weak, tepid spray of the bathhouse shower, I checked for bruises that I never found.
Not much of a vacation. But I was determined to stick it out. Once I got going, drank enough coffee, ran the car as fast as I could on the roads, walked as fast as I could on the trails, the days were wonderful, and the nights just had to get better. On my next-to-last morning, I sat at the rough picnic table by my tent and checked through the valley guidebook for anything I’d regret missing. Maybe the ghost towns would be good. See what was left of other people’s lives. Get my mind off my own for a while.
The town of Chloride was halfway up a mountain, set in a small bowl, with no view of anything except dun slopes rising all around, pocked with the dark mouths of mine entrances, just big enough for a stooped man to pass through. There were other holes in the relatively flat ground between the houses, marked off with rocks and old warnings and the narrow slats of collapsed fences. According to the guidebook, people had stuck it out here until the early 1950s, and then, when the silver finally ran out, they left for parts unknown. The few standing houses didn’t look to have ever been much more than shacks, but it was hard to tell. Half a century of weathering had scoured away any paint that might have been on the warped wood. There wasn’t much inside the houses, just dirt piled up in corners, that had blown in past the doors hanging crookedly on loosening hinges, and gray floorboards that gapped in places, rose in others, and altogether looked unreliable for holding a person’s weight. But there was a cup in the last house, overturned beside the remnants of what might have been a table, and I wanted it. I picked my way across the uneven planks, shifting quickly to the left when one board sank, groaning, beneath my feet. The cup was heavy porcelain, would have been white once, but now was brown and gritty with dust. I knelt there, wrapped my hands around it, rubbed a finger across the places where it had chipped when it fell or was dropped, and imagined a person giving up one life, deciding what to take, or leave, on the way to another. Maybe the cup was broken already, easy to let go of. No other small objects had been left behind.
Out in the open space between the circle of houses, I’d passed machines the size, though not the shape, of tractors, all of them worn and broken, chains and gears and levers rusting, the specifics of their former use indecipherable to me. When I came back out of the last house, picking my way carefully, and looked up from the worn, splintering steps, Frank was there, leaning against one of the machines, booted feet crossed at the ankles, arms crossed over his chest, a smile on his face. I couldn’t help it, I dropped the cup, and didn’t have to look to know from the sound that it had hit a rock and broken in two.
“Imagine running into you here,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have anything coherent to say.
“I brought enough lunch for two. I know you don’t like to carry much.”
I cut my eyes off to the right, searching for where I’d left my pack in the bit of shade by the first house, and he saw.
“Oh, I brought it over for you a minute ago. It’s right here,” and he gestured behind him. “I know you had it in the shade, but it can’t have warmed up enough to matter. Here,” he held out my water bottle, “you must be thirsty.”
I shook my head, “I drank a lot before I started the hike up. I haven’t been here that long.”
“Really?” he said. “Hasn’t seemed that way to me. Feels like I’ve been waiting out here forever. Thought maybe you’d curled up and fallen asleep.” And he scuffed his boot, just once, across the dirt in front of him, the small rocks scraping and the few stems of dry weeds cracking in the silence around us. He was still smiling.
I jammed my hands into my pockets, hoped he hadn’t seen how much they were shaking. That sound, the simple scrape of a boot, I’d been hearing it night after night, and lied to myself, like I’d lied about so many things, telling myself it didn’t matter, that it wasn’t what it was. And I still wanted to lie. I looked at him, at his grey eyes — he’d told me he never wore sunglasses — at that kind, smiling face, and tried to believe that we could have lunch, walk down the mountain, and I could get in my car and drive away.
“Why would you think I’d sleep here?” I asked, forcing out something like a laugh. I looked around, hoping it would seem mere puzzlement, afraid he’d know I was looking for places to hide. There was no brush, just those empty slopes and small, dead-end mines, little more than crumbling holes reeking of chlorine gas.
“You must be tired,” he answered.
I didn’t ask how he knew I wasn’t sleeping. I said, “It’s not that long a walk.” Though it seemed as far away as home, to get back to the road.
“That’s good,” he said. He was still smiling. God, I thought, my brain flailing around for something to think that wasn’t a nightmare come to waking, walking life, his face must be getting sore, smiling that much. And quick as that, it changed, his expression going sad and sympathetic. “It would be a shame to get lost,” he said, “going from one place to another.” He flicked his hand through the hot, quiet air. “Like some of these folks did, far as we can tell. Earth could have just swallowed them up.”
“No,” I said, “they would have had family, people waiting for them.”