Neither Liz nor Harry knew anyone who lived in these parts, so Annie had booked a room at a small hotel near Mount Rushmore. She had never seen the monument and had looked forward to coming here with Grace. But when they pulled into the hotel's deserted parking lot it was dark and raining and Annie thought the only good thing about being there was that she wouldn't have to make polite conversation with hosts she'd never met and would never meet again.
The rooms were all named after different presidents. Theirs was Abraham Lincoln. His beard jutted at them from laminated prints on every wall and an extract from the Gettysburg Address hung above the TV, partly obscured by a glossy cardboard sign advertising adult movies. There were two large beds, side by side, and Grace collapsed on the one farthest from the door while Annie went back out into the rain to see to Pilgrim.
The horse seemed to be getting used to the rituals of the journey. Confined in the narrow stall of the trailer, he no longer erupted when Annie stepped into the cramped, protected space in front of him. He just edged back into the darkness and watched. She could feel his eyes on her while she hung up a new net of hay and carefully pushed his buckets of feed and water within reach. He would never touch them until she had gone. She sensed his simmering hostility and was both scared and excited by it so that when she closed the door on him her heart was pounding.
When she got back to the room, Grace had undressed and was in bed. Her back was turned and whether she was asleep or just pretending, Annie couldn't tell.
'Grace?' she said softly. 'Don't you want to eat?' There was no reaction. Annie thought about going alone to the restaurant, but couldn't face it. She took a long, hot bath, hoping the water would bring her comfort. All it brought her was doubt. It hung in the air with the steam, enfolding her. What on earth did she think she was doing, dragging these two wounded souls across a continent, in some gruesome reprise of pioneer madness? Grace's silence and the remorseless emptiness of the spaces they had crossed made Annie feel suddenly, terribly alone. To obliterate these thoughts, she slid her hands between her legs and felt herself, worked at herself, refusing to concede to the initial stubborn numbness until at last her loins twitched and swam and she was lost.
That night she dreamed she was walking with her father along a snowy ridge, roped like mountaineers, though this was something they had never done. Below, on either side, sheer walls of rock and ice plunged to nothingness. They were on a cornice, a thin overhanging crust of snow which her father said was safe. He was in front of her and he turned to her and smiled the way he smiled in her favorite photograph, a smile which said with total confidence that he was with her and everything was alright. And as he did so, over his shoulder she saw a crack zigzagging toward them and the lip of the cornice start to split away and tumble down the mountainside. She wanted to cry out but couldn't and the moment before the crack reached them, her father turned and saw it. And then he was gone and Annie saw the rope between them snaking after him and she realized the only way to save them both was to jump the other way. So she launched herself into the air on the other side of the ridge. But instead of feeling the rope jolt and hold, she just kept on falling, free-falling into the void.
When she woke it was morning. They had slept late. Outside it was raining even harder. Mount Rushmore and its stone faces were hidden in swirling cloud that the woman in reception said wasn't going to clear. Not far away, she said, there was another mountain carving they could maybe get a glimpse of, a giant figure of Crazy Horse.
'Thanks,' said Annie. 'We've got our own.' They had breakfast, checked out and drove back up to the interstate. They crossed the state line into Wyoming and skirted south of Devil's Tower and Thunder Basin, then over the Powder River and up toward Sheridan where at last the rain stopped.
Increasingly the pickups and trucks they saw were driven by men in cowboy hats. Some touched their brims or lifted a hand in grave salute. As they went by, the sun made rainbows in the plumes of their tail-spray.
It was late afternoon when they crossed into Montana. But Annie felt neither relief nor any sense of achievement. She had tried so hard not to let Grace's silence beat her. All day she had hopped stations on the radio and listened to Bible-thumping preachers, livestock reports and more kinds of country music than she'd known existed. But it was no good. She felt herself compressed into an ever-shrinking space between the weight of her daughter's gloom and her own welling anger, At last it was too much to bear. Some forty miles into Montana, neither looking nor caring where it led, she took an exit off the interstate.
She wanted to park but nowhere seemed right. There was a massive casino standing on its own and as she looked, its neon sign flickered on, red and lurid in the fading light. She drove on up a hill, past a cafe and a low straggle of stores with a dirt parking strip in front. Two Indians with long black hair and feathers in their high-crowned cowboy hats stood beside a battered pickup, watching the Lariat and trailer approach. Something in their gaze unsettled her and she kept on up the hill, took a right turn and stopped. She switched off the ignition and for a while sat very still. She could sense Grace behind her, watching. The girl's voice, when at last she spoke, was cautious.
'What's going on?'
'What?' Annie said sharply.
'It's closed. Look.'
There was a sign along the road that said National Monument, Little Bighorn Battlefield. Grace was right. According to the opening hours it gave, the place had closed an hour ago. It made Annie even angrier that Grace should so misjudge her mood to think she had come here deliberately, like a tourist. She didn't trust herself to look at her. She just stared ahead and took a deep breath.
'How long is this going to go on, Grace?'
'What?'
'You know what I mean. How long is it going to go on?'
There was a long pause. Annie watched a ball of tumbleweed chase its own shadow down the road toward them. It brushed the side of the car as it went by. She turned to look at Grace and the girl looked away and shrugged.
'Hmm? I mean, is this it now?' Annie went on. 'We've come nearly two thousand miles and you've sat there and you haven't spoken a word. So I just thought I'd ask, just so I know. Is this the way you and I are going to be now?'
Grace was looking down, fiddling with her Walkman. She shrugged again.
'I dunno.'
'Do you want us to turn around and go back home?' Grace gave a bitter little laugh.
'Well, do you?'
Grace lifted her eyes and looked sideways out of the window, trying to seem nonchalant, but Annie could see she was fighting tears. There was a clumping sound as Pilgrim shifted in the trailer.
'Because if that's what you want—'
Suddenly Grace turned on her, her face savage and distorted. The tears were running now and the failure to stop them doubled her fury.
'What the hell do you care!' she screamed. 'You decide! You always do! You pretend you care what other people want but you don't, it's just bullshit!'
'Grace,' Annie said gently, putting a hand out. But Grace smacked it away.
'Don't! Just leave me alone!'
Annie looked at her for a moment then opened the door and got out. She started walking, blindly, tilting her face to the wind. The road led up past a grove of pine trees to a parking lot and a low building, both deserted. She kept walking. She followed a path that curved up the hillside and found herself beside a cemetery enclosed by black iron railings. At the crest of the hill there was a simple stone monument and it was here that Annie stopped.
On this hillside, on a June day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer and more than two hundred soldiers were cut to pieces by those they had sought to slaughter. Their names were etched in the stone. Annie turned to look down the hill at the scattered white tombstones. They cast long shadows in the last pale reach of the sun. She stood there and looked out across the vast, rolling plains of wind-flattened grass that stretched away from this sorrowful place to a horizon where sorrow was infinite. And she started to weep.