The Desert Sky Before Us Read online

  Dedication

  For Michelle

  Epigraph

  “Most deserts have a memory of the sea. . . .

  If the world ends, let me be here.”

  —Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  39.8517° N, 88.9442° W: Decatur, Illinois

  40.1097° N, 88.2042° W: Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

  38.6311° N, 90.2703° W: St. Louis, MO

  38.9111° N, 101.1758° W: Russell Springs, KS

  38.8673° N, 104.7607° W: Colorado Springs, CO

  38.8673° N, 104.7607° W: Colorado Springs, CO

  38.4419° N, 105.2209° W: Cañon City, CO

  32.1753° N, 104.4439° W: Carlsbad, NM

  32.1757° N, 104.3766° W: Whites City, NM

  37.3498° N, 108.5767° W: Cortez, CO

  37.3498° N, 108.5767° W: Cortez, CO

  38.5725º N, 109.5497º W: Moab, UT

  39.3228º N, 110.6895º W: Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT

  39.3228º N, 110.6895º W: Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT

  39.3228º N, 110.6895º W: Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT

  39.3228º N, 110.6895º W: Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT

  40.7608º N, 111.8910º W: Salt Lake City, UT

  41.4462º N, 112.2622º W: Corinne, UT

  41.4377º N, 112.6689º W: Spiral Jetty, UT

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Anne Valente

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  39.8517° N, 88.9442° W:

  Decatur, Illinois

  Rhiannon expects her in uniform. White polyester polo. Navy pants. Black orthopedic shoes. The same state-issued clothes Billie’s worn each time Rhiannon’s visited the Decatur Correctional Center across the six years of her sister’s sentence, the same starched shirt and rough fabric given to each inmate upon entry. Rhiannon waits in the car sheltered from low clouds and the constant spit of June rain. The engine running, a commuter Mustang still far less familiar to her than a stock car. She lets the air-conditioning blow out of habit, what would have once been expected at the start of summer instead of this year’s steady stream of dulled rain across Illinois.

  She glances down at the car’s mileage count, a speedometer instead of the close attention she once paid to a tachometer. Revolutions per minute. Maintenance no more than routine now, the five years since she raced nearly as long as the six-year span of her sister’s prison sentence. Rhiannon waits at the Correctional Center’s curb anticipating Billie with no personal items but the standard-issued bus ticket each inmate receives when released. A cluster of women gathers beyond the Mustang’s windshield, their figures clearing into relief each time the wipers slide drizzle from the glass. Women in street clothes. Women without umbrellas, standing beside small packed bags. Nowhere among them her sister. Rhiannon lowers the dial on the car radio to avoid the latest news, the seventh commercial plane crash in the past four months.

  A Frontier flight carrying 126 passengers from Los Angeles to Houston: the reason airports are beginning to shut down across the nation and the world.

  Rhiannon turns the radio off, a silence that evaded her the night before as she stayed up watching scrolls of headlines on CNN. A trail of wreckage in eastern Arizona, just past the edge of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. No black box recovered. Only speculation, only the garbled voices of air traffic controllers in Los Angeles and Houston reporting what they knew. Rhiannon sat in the dark and imagined shards of metal scattered across the Sonoran Desert. She sat in the dark and wondered what she would say to her sister the following day and across the coming days of sharing a car for the two weeks of driving ahead of them, their first conversations in six years beyond the monitored tables of the Correctional Center’s visiting room.

  When she looks up from the radio’s dial, Billie is standing with both of her thin-boned hands wrapped around the handle of a suitcase. No umbrella. Her hair rain-damp, her head half shaved to a deep side part, dyed-red strands spilling down her chin. Her hair naturally brown like Rhiannon’s but hidden since high school beneath boxed coloring kits and bleaches. Rhiannon recognizes the suitcase: their mother’s red-leather Amelia Earhart bag, what she and Billie fought over when they were kids. Their mother’s former flight bag to dig sites, what she let them use to store their doll clothes. Rhiannon remembers Billie dumping their Barbies’ lace skirts and velvet dresses and filling the suitcase instead with a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich and a paper fan and two undershirts and six dimes, everything a four-year-old thought she needed to travel the country like their mother.

  Beyond the bag, Rhiannon recognizes the hollowness in her sister’s face.

  She thinks of the route ahead of them, two weeks on the road, trail mix and protein bars already packed in a cooler for the next morning’s departure. From Illinois straight across Missouri to Kansas then all the way through Colorado to the border of Utah. The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry: where their mother spent the bulk of her career unearthing stegosaurus bones, the densest concentration of Jurassic fossils in the entire world. Dr. Margaret Hurst. Their mother a Jurassic paleontologist specializing in the function of stegosaur plates. And this route, what she’d devised four months ago when she learned Billie’s release date and realized she wouldn’t live long enough to see her daughter come home.

  A second funeral.

  A favor she called in through the Bureau of Land Management.

  A scattering of ashes across the desert though she was already lowered down three months ago in the wet fog of a Midwestern spring, this second ceremony nothing more than a symbolic gesture for a daughter whose prison refused early release for a parent’s burial. Rhiannon visualized the route west as she drove from their childhood home in Champaign-Urbana to the Decatur Correctional Center that morning, a fifty-minute drive down Interstate 72 that had grown routine. The abandoned Sinclair station just past the turnoff for Lodge Park. A cluster of wind turbines spinning slowly in the stark fields, white blades and gray clouds. A drive so much shorter than the route their mother planned for them across four states to Utah, a route she’d whispered to Rhiannon from a reclined hospital bed in her final weeks. Go west. Her mouth close to Rhiannon’s ear. It will be good for both of you. A route Rhiannon hasn’t driven in over five years, one she tried to imagine from the rain-sprinkled cornfields along the highway between Champaign and Decatur as the radio’s news circulated again and again on the latest downed plane.

  Rhiannon pulls the Mustang up to where Billie stands in the weak rain at the Correctional Center’s curb. Through the thin light of a gunmetal sky, Rhiannon sees a line of small silver hoops glinting along her sister’s ear, what she didn’t notice the last time she visited over two months ago. She wonders who pierced her sister’s ears, who dyed her sister’s hair, a community inside the prison’s walls that Billie’s hardly ever mentioned. Billie wears threadbare jeans and a black T-shirt, what she must have been wearing at intake six years ago. Billie still a girl then at twenty-six and Rhiannon wonders if her clothes still carry the thick scent of smoke and ash.

  Rhiannon shifts the car into park, leaves the engine on, pops the trunk and circles out front. Drizzle pelts her face as she pulls her sister into a stiff embrace.

  Nice car, Billie says against Rhiannon’s ear.

  Are you hungry? is the only thing Rhiannon can think to say.

  Billie nods and slides into the passenger seat and Rhiannon circles around to the driver’s side of the cherry-red Ford Mustang GT, a car she bought two years into her new job as a textbook sales repres
entative and two years into Billie’s sentence, a two-door model the dealership’s salesman made sure to remind her would be impractical for a family and kids. Might be a tight squeeze back there for a car seat. Every American dealership a microcosm of the racetrack. Assumed roles. The art of negotiation the realm of masculinity, the same as hospitality tents and checkered flags and sponsorship banners and 235,000 fans in the stands of every major speedway, all of them there for the promise of a man behind a wheel. Rhiannon drops into the Mustang and buckles her belt, the silence thick in the absence of the radio’s hum.

  Where do you want to eat your first real meal? she asks.

  I don’t care. Billie stares straight ahead. Anything but stale bread and meat.

  Rhiannon imagines some diner along the highway where their mother will inevitably come up between them, where they’ll finally discuss the details of the coming two weeks. She hasn’t seen Billie in nearly three months, a trip they’ve only discussed through clipped collect phone calls since their mother’s funeral. She tries not to notice the heavy chicken skin of her sister’s left arm, burn scars snaking up her elbow and disappearing beneath her shirtsleeve. Scars she’s never seen before, Billie’s prison-issue shirts always long-sleeved and starched. She tries not to notice the other women, bus tickets in their hands, waiting in the rain of the Mustang’s rearview mirror.

  THE STEAK ’N SHAKE off I-72 is sparsely populated, midafternoon on a Saturday in central Illinois. Rhiannon orders only coffee, Billie a tuna melt with fries and coleslaw and an Oreo milkshake. Whipped cream and a cherry, she tells the server, who slides a pencil behind his ear and recedes to the kitchen.

  Do you have a parole officer? Rhiannon asks, though she knows the answer is no. As Billie’s repatriating family contact, she knows Billie is only required to attend mandated therapy in the state of Illinois upon release.

  The server brings Billie’s milkshake, an iridescent cherry on top. Rhiannon tries not to notice Billie’s first gulping sip through the straw.

  Is that really what you want to talk about? Billie asks.

  What do you want to talk about?

  Billie watches her across the table. Tell me about your life. Travels. Races. I haven’t seen you in almost three months.

  Rhiannon looks down at her mug. Ignores travels and races and everything she’s kept hidden since Billie went to prison for two words far more piercing: three months. The span of time since their mother passed away, a blink, quick as the cancer that seized her brilliant brain. The last time Rhiannon saw Billie, their mother was alive.

  Work’s fine, Rhiannon says. Fine enough to give me two weeks off.

  That’s a miracle during the busiest season, Billie says as the server slides her tuna melt onto the table. I can’t believe you get two weeks away from summer races.

  Rhiannon looks out the window at the slate June sky, once thick with heat and Illinois humidity and blue-drenched sun and the heavy crack of thunder. Now nothing but increased gray rain since March, a constant mist, temperatures hovering always in the low sixties. She visited Billie once a month for six years. Once a month and never told her she stopped racing cars right after Billie was imprisoned. That she stopped racing and began selling textbooks, as profitable a job as any in a college town, a job with ample time to take two weeks off in the middle of a university’s summer break while NASCAR motored on through June and July. She made her mother promise not to say a word to Billie when she visited Decatur, a promise her mother kept across six full years.

  I already planned our route, Rhiannon says. Ready to head out tomorrow?

  Billie dips two matchstick fries into the ketchup pooled on her plate. I’m ready.

  We can wait a day or two if you need some time to adjust and take it easy.

  I don’t need to take it easy. Billie’s voice is firm. I missed her funeral. Enough bullshit. Enough small talk. Why don’t you tell me about her funeral?

  Rhiannon watches Billie across the table and wonders what there is to tell. That she’d been the only person for days in their childhood home going through their mother’s boxes of clothing and old dishes before their father came down from Chicago wanting her wedding ring, an aquamarine stone she’d taken off just after they divorced, a ring Rhiannon couldn’t find anywhere in the sparse jewelry sachets and the one safe-deposit box. That their father still wore its twin. That Rhiannon hadn’t seen him in almost two months since he’d been out on training circuits for upcoming summer races. That it rained the entire service. That their father tried his best to talk with his ex-wife’s colleagues from the University of Illinois’s geology department at the reception following the funeral and that Rhiannon saw they still made him uncomfortable, conversations he’d always avoided for fear of not knowing the right terminology. How they both stood among their mother’s friends and relatives who came in from every corner of the country, Rhiannon’s cousins and second cousins and her mother’s sister from Dallas who stood behind her throughout the entire service, a hand firm but tremoring on her shoulder, and Beth standing beside her without holding her hand.

  It was nice, is all Rhiannon says. It was what she would have wanted.

  What she would have wanted, Billie repeats.

  The server refills Rhiannon’s coffee and the heat in Billie’s voice dims.

  We have to be at the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry in a week? she says.

  More or less. It’s not a solid date. The Bureau of Land Management knows we’re coming. They’ll let us do the service whenever we get there.

  You just have to be back within two weeks.

  I have a job, Rhiannon says. And you’re required to report within two weeks.

  I have time, Billie says. No mandatory supervision. No reports to any office.

  Rhiannon knows this. Knows everything from the prison’s debriefing before Billie’s release. How Billie’s arson sentence was heavy but not dire enough to require a parole officer, supervision, regular check-ins. How her only postincarceration probation requirement is to see a mental health counselor once a week for the next twelve months. How the appointments have been mandated to start within two weeks of release, another reason for their trip’s quick out-and-back. How a program officer visited the house three weeks ago to verify the address and number of bedrooms and number of residents and how Rhiannon had replied only one resident, the words three thick rocks in her mouth. How Rhiannon doesn’t know what Billie’s plans will be once they’ve driven out to the border separating Colorado and Utah and driven back and Billie takes up residence with her in their childhood home in Champaign-Urbana, the house on Grove Street that Rhiannon returned to when their mother got sick and where she’s been sorting through boxes since March, since moving out of the apartment she shared with Beth.

  My fines are almost paid, Billie says. My restitution too. We have nothing but time. Time to drive way the fuck out to Utah and all the way back.

  Rhiannon knows Billie’s fines, the restitution to Illinois College’s Schewe Library that she has helped her family pay across the years Billie’s been in prison. Rhiannon’s sales job so much of what ended up paying for Billie’s mistakes, and even still: she’s hidden every single textbook before her sister sets foot inside the house. She downs the last of her coffee, grinds she can taste at the bottom of the cup. She signals the server for the check.

  AT HOME, RHIANNON watches the six o’clock news in the living room while Billie takes a long shower upstairs, the whine of water groaning through the walls of the house. On the news: more footage of the Frontier flight’s wreckage in eastern Arizona. A scattering of ripped metal. A tail wing. A trio of seats, a suitcase still packed with rolled socks and folded shirts. Twenty-seven minutes into flight, not even long enough for the plane to reach cruising altitude, the seventh plane in less than four months. A bizarre string of crashes that newspapers and media pundits are still debating whether they’re linked or catastrophically coincidental, a continued stream of news that Rhiannon has barely been able to focus on
given the crashes’ proximity to her mother’s death.

  The first plane: a disappearance in February, somewhere in the Indian Ocean between the Maldives and Perth where the wreckage was never found, only two months after her mother’s initial diagnosis and rapid decline. The second a crash outside of Tokyo in early March amid unseasonable monsoons pummeling the coast of Japan, the news blinking blue on the television screen above her mother’s hospital bed only nights before she passed away. Then three weeks later, a plane lost to the desert of the Congo just days after Rhiannon buried her mother in the rain-drenched fields of Greenlawn Cemetery. Then Russia: where ice floes still pocked the Volga River in late April and frigid waters made wreckage recovery next to impossible, Rhiannon poring through her mother’s closets and the garage’s storage. Then a crash in Suriname only a week later, a 747 carrying 502 people from Buenos Aires to New York, Rhiannon staring blankly at a computer screen in the small cubicle of her office reeling from moving the last of her things out of Beth’s apartment. Then a plane crossing the North Sea from Sweden to Greenland in late May, no sign of storms, Rhiannon making preparations for a cross-country trip, Rhiannon blocking everything out but this. And now the US mainland, the seventh plane in less than four months. Rhiannon watches the news and hears the shower shut off upstairs. Airports across the world in a state of ratcheting panic, what her mother seemed to understand as she faded in and out of consciousness during her final weeks. Two planes already lost in quick succession, the reason she insisted her daughters drive to Utah instead of fly.

  Her mother kept the television on in her Carle Clinic room on the many nights Rhiannon stayed long past visiting hours in a thinly upholstered bedside chair, the screen’s glow candle-flickering blue across the walls. Always old reruns of I Love Lucy when the news wasn’t on, current events her mother still insisted on knowing. And when her mother was sleeping, Rhiannon watched her dream, eyes trembling in the stages of REM, hands oscillating subtly back and forth. Rhiannon memorized her face. The way her thumbs and pointer fingers clasped together and formed a complete loop. Picking, Rhiannon realized. Her mother was picking in her sleep. A movement as second nature to her as eating. Rhiannon knew the motion well from the countless times she’d visited her mother’s office on campus, the pick a tool she remembered best because it matched the tool their family dentist used when she was small. The same utensil Rhiannon’s hygienist uses in Champaign-Urbana every six months, a tool Rhiannon knows will gut her on every single checkup for the rest of her life. A dental pick. Her mother running the beveled edge along fossilized bone to remove caked soil, chiseling out slabs of rock and shipping them to Illinois and notching them into sharp relief when she wasn’t out in the field at the quarry.