The Desert Sky Before Us Read online

  The newscaster on-screen reports the closing of certain airports. The possibility of climate change as a factor, what pundits have been speculating for the past four months. A possibility Rhiannon recognized thumbing through one of the aviation textbooks she sold, what she couldn’t stop herself from reading due to her own fear of flying: an atmospheric study indicating increased clear-air turbulence. Jet stream modifications due to warming poles. A rise in air traffic causing wind wakes. Her father had dismissed it all as modern mythology when she mentioned it on the phone between his racing trips from Chicago. But her mother knew the earth. Its sediment and layers. She shook her head and said flights to the quarry had become more turbulent when she was still healthy and traveling regularly to Utah, the weather around every site she’d visited in the last ten years growing more severe, more windswept, more dangerous.

  Do we still have cable? Billie asks. Rhiannon looks up and her sister is standing in the living room in a T-shirt and sweatpants, the unshaved side of her hair still wet.

  Mom never got rid of it. Watch as much MTV as you like.

  Billie sits down on the couch. We had movie night once a month in Decatur. But only family films. Grease. Toy Story.

  How’s the old bedroom?

  My posters and hemp necklaces are gone. Other than that, everything’s the same.

  Rhiannon knows Billie’s old bedroom looks nothing like it did in high school. Her mother painted both of their rooms once they moved out, made Billie’s a work studio filled with dig tools and Rhiannon’s a guest bedroom.

  Did you find your stuff in the closet? Rhiannon says. The rest of it is out in the garage.

  Thanks. I’ll get to it eventually.

  Rhiannon says nothing more, her sister’s stuff everything she left behind in Jacksonville that had to be moved once she went to prison. A house she’d shared with her ex-boyfriend Tim. Rhiannon and her parents hauling Billie’s clothing and books out of the small two-bedroom house a half mile from Illinois College in the rushed panic of Billie in the hospital followed by Billie behind bars. Tim hadn’t helped at all, holed away in his campus office so he wouldn’t have to see them. Rhiannon’s asked Billie only twice across the past six years if she heard from him since and both times her sister shook her head, her mouth a line drawn tight.

  Billie glances at the television’s footage of the wreck. We weren’t so closed off inside to not hear about all this. Is this why Mom wanted us to drive?

  Rhiannon nods. She doesn’t know what else to say.

  What time are we leaving tomorrow?

  I don’t know. Nine. Ten? You can sleep in if you want.

  I’m used to getting up at six. Prison orders. I’ll probably be up before the sun.

  Rhiannon looks out the living room’s bay window. Nearly the first day of summer, tonight a long June evening that should have held an equally long sunset. The window fogged with gray, the same charcoal haze pressed against the windowpanes since March.

  I’ll set an alarm just in case, Rhiannon says. It should be sunnier out west.

  She assumes but isn’t sure. She’s seen the weather reports, the climate abnormalities in every part of the country. In the Midwest: rain and clouded skies, temperatures at least twenty degrees below normal since spring. In the Northeast: hot and dry, the same as the West and the Southwest where states of emergency have been declared due to drought. And in the Great Plains: so much wind. Gusts reaching 50 miles per hour. Rhiannon feels a hand on her leg, the first time Billie has touched her beyond their first strained hug.

  If I didn’t say it before, Billie says, thanks for taking me in. Thanks for letting me stay.

  Rhiannon turns off the television. She’s done nothing but pick Billie up. This isn’t her house anymore, both of them interlopers, bedrooms no longer theirs. She’s done nothing but map the logistics of a route their mother planned across four states.

  Dad may call you tomorrow before we leave, Rhiannon says. I haven’t talked to him much, but he knows you’re home. He knows we’re leaving in the morning.

  Rhiannon hears Billie’s breath halt and waits for her to speak. What they’ve never discussed, Billie shutting down the conversation every time Rhiannon brought it up: across six years, their father hasn’t visited the Decatur Correctional Center once.

  I’m heading to bed, Billie says though it’s not even seven o’clock.

  Extra blankets in the hall closet, Rhiannon says. In case you get cold.

  She stays on the couch and knows they’re too old now but imagines light flooding beneath Billie’s closed bedroom door if she followed her upstairs. What she saw so many nights of their childhood shared in this house. Billie reading books in bed when she should have been asleep. Billie obscuring the glow by bunching sheets around her flashlight, by lining a towel along the bottom edge of her door. Never Gulliver’s Travels or Peter Pan. Always books on science, still lining the bookshelves of Billie’s bedroom turned office. Books on fossils, just like their mother. Books on herpetariums. Books on the lakes and streams of Illinois. Then in high school, ornithology guides that Rhiannon can only guess quickly became manuals on falconry in college. Birding handbooks. Guides to constellations. The same kind of books their mother was writing, contributions to paleontological textbooks and scientific journals, a language Rhiannon never understood. The same kinds of books found scattered and burned all around Billie in Illinois College’s library when she was taken to the hospital and then arrested. Audubon’s Birds of America. An atlas of world maps, splayed open to Mozambique. The pages of an illustrated history of oceanography flamed down to a fine husk. Rhiannon hears Billie walking around in the bedroom upstairs and then her footsteps fall silent.

  Rhiannon leans into the couch’s cushions and listens to the hollowed echo of the house, the quiet patter of rain on the roof. So many empty rooms. Closets filled with jewelry, vacation seashells, musty coats and rain boots, old vinyl albums. What she’s been sorting through since March, what she and Billie will continue thinning out when they return from Utah. Rhiannon imagines the walls of Beth’s apartment less than two miles away, the lithographs and silkscreens surely still on the walls. Beth’s artwork. Beth’s delicate things everywhere. A French press and tea tins and coffee table books on Jim Dine and Jean-Michel Basquiat. An entire book on the Spiral Jetty, an earthwork sculpture curling out from the shore of the Great Salt Lake, the kind of land art Beth wanted to create. Rhiannon had barely moved anything into their apartment. She pulls her phone from her back pocket. Hesitates. Dials Beth’s number anyway, still the top contact in her phone.

  Beth picks up on the second ring. How’s she doing?

  We’re both fine. Still scheduled to leave tomorrow morning.

  You talk to your dad?

  Not yet. I’m guessing he’ll call before we leave.

  A garbled noise on the line. Beth eating. A Friday night. Rhiannon knows she’s called at dinner, knows Beth could easily be with someone else.

  Are you ready for the trip? Beth asks.

  Not really. But I can’t back out. Not now.

  Want to come over?

  Rhiannon closes her eyes. The light-filled apartment she moved into four years ago and left at the end of March. No fight. No grand severing. Only a slow drift that still feels sometimes like love.

  I shouldn’t, Rhiannon says. We should stop doing this.

  You’re the one who left, Beth says though there is no accusation in her voice. A statement of fact. Beth beside her at the cemetery, a hand Rhiannon wouldn’t hold to keep everything still and measured and restrained before she dragged her picture frames and her clothes back to her childhood bedroom within a week. A toothbrush. T-shirts. Everything so easy to move. Nothing meant to stay, she knows in hindsight, her racing helmet still hanging in the garage of her mother’s house. The one item she never moved to Beth’s apartment. A past life she and Beth barely acknowledged.

  I miss you, Rhiannon says.

  She says it and watches the thick gray
rain out the window and listens to the silence of her sister’s room through the ceiling above her.

  I miss you too, Beth says. Get some sleep. And drive safe out there on the road.

  When the line falls silent, Rhiannon tries to picture the route beyond the drone of the living room’s television and the boxes of Christmas decorations her mother left behind. Illinois. Missouri. Kansas. Colorado. The road sprawled ahead of them west on Interstate 70 straight out toward Utah, a road she traveled countless times with her father on racing trips, a road unfurling toward their mother, a road unfurling toward goodbye.

  What she couldn’t tell Billie when she asked, what their mother’s funeral had really been: that among bouquets of lilies and the rain and the soft pressure of her aunt’s hand on her shoulder, Beth quiet beside her, Rhiannon felt at last what she’d tried so hard to imagine for six years.

  What it was that Billie felt in the library.

  What it felt like to ignite.

  What it felt like to burn.

  HURST, MARGARET. PHD. “VASCULARIZATION AND FUNCTIONALITY OF STEGOSAURUS PLATES.” PALEONTOLOGY AND THE JURASSIC AGE: A TEXTUAL COMPENDIUM. ED. JONATHAN MCGREG. NETHERLANDS: ELSEVIER, 1999. 22–30. PRINT.

  CALL NUMBER: QE860.4 .R16 2009

  ABSTRACT

  The functionality of stegosaurus plates, two rows of bone along the ridge of the reptile’s spine, has long been debated in the fields of paleontology and geology. This paper proposes that among varying theories for the plates’ functionality, including self-defense and size augmentation against predators, an alternative might be considered for mate attraction and signal communication. Given the presence of blood vessels in each plate, and the subsequent presence of blushing and changed color, this paper submits that stegosaurus plates were intended to attract potential mates and signal other herd members regarding potential food sources, environmental conditions, and the possibility of approaching danger.

  Because the stegosaurus’s plates were vascularized, carrying blood vessels rather than containing solely bone and cartilage, blushing among stegosaurus herds is a strong indication that the plates’ color was used to attract mates, as well as to communicate signals to other herd members regarding food availability, potential danger, and change in atmosphere or climate. To date, vascularization has been assumed to suggest only temperature control for a cold-blooded reptile. However, the orientation of the plates as well as their flexibility and range of motion suggests that vascularization served multiple functions, including mate attraction and sensitivity to environmental harbingers.

  40.1097° N, 88.2042° W:

  Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

  Sometimes from the thin mattress of her prison-dorm bed, Billie lay in the dark and imagined Rhiannon racing the track of the Chicagoland Speedway. Her car a flash across blacktop. Two hundred miles per hour. Gripped tires crackling across the asphalt’s heat and Rhiannon lowered inside a single-seat cockpit. A fighter pilot’s reflexes: what it took to command a stock car at the highest speeds a land vehicle could reach. Rhiannon had been in the garage with their father for as long as Billie’s brain was old enough to make memories, her sister as much a part of the NASCAR world as diesel-soaked rags and cans of gasoline.

  Billie shifts on the mattress of the pullout couch in her old bedroom, the metal bar digging into her back still more comfortable than the rungs of a state-issued prison bed. A room that seemed so small to her in childhood filled now with the enormity of being alone, no bunkmates, no constant coughs and yells, the first time she’s been by herself in years beyond finding the farthest corner of the prison yard and standing as still as possible, her eyes scanning the trees for hawks. Falconry. The hobby she chose, so different from her mother and sister and father. All around her in her mother’s office: rock picks. Chipping hammers. Chisels and tweezers. The tools of a trade lined across the room’s shelves and her mother’s corner desk. Also on the desk: a single textbook, what Billie knows hides one of the most well-known articles her mother wrote when Billie was still in high school. “Vascularization and Functionality of Stegosaurus Plates.” QE860: a call number Billie never came across in Illinois College’s Schewe Library or the prison library despite memorizing the Dewey decimal system. Beside the textbook sits a lone stegosaurus metacarpal, one of the dinosaur’s smallest bones. What her mother could transport and keep at home, what she showed her daughters when they were small. And the main focus of her life’s work: what the stegosaurus’s trademark plates were for.

  A paleontological controversy, Billie knew. A decades-long debate over whether the plates were used for defense or thermal regulation, for camouflage or self-protection. Growing up, Billie remembers her mother’s voice at the dinner table discussing armored plates while her father pretended to listen, a driver himself before retiring to join Rhiannon’s maintenance crew. It was only after reading earth science texts as a University of Illinois biology major and then as a circulation clerk at Illinois College that Billie gained a better sense of her mother’s work. Her mother believed the plates were vascularized with blood vessels to sense shifts in weather, and also meant to attract mates. No different than a male cardinal’s crimson feathers. A mating call. A method of animal magnetism. The same as a red-tailed hawk’s aerial dance of courtship.

  Birds descendants of dinosaurs, though Billie knew falconry was nothing compared to her mother’s work. Birding something Billie pursued instead of chasing Jurassic fossils or the adrenaline rush of race cars, nothing more than a hobby to her mother’s career and her sister’s fame and her father’s lifelong passion for the road. What Billie kept as a pursuit of leisure, her library job a means of meager funding, the only person in her family without a clear career. Birding notoriously a white man’s hobby, no different from the world of paleontology or the world of racing. Her teacher, Bud, the only Latino falconer in the state of Illinois. She’d called him on a whim after finding his listing in the phone book one lazy afternoon after house-party hopping the night before, an impulse she knew was sheer curiosity born from her biology classes and not the influence of her mother’s work. Billie still wonders what made Bud accept her as an apprentice, so few women in the field, so few of anyone but middle-aged men.

  Light rain pelts the lone window of her once-bedroom, a wash of gray water. She sinks into the pullout couch’s sheets, flannel bedding Rhiannon must have chosen instead of thin cotton, what should have been more appropriate for June. She watches the walls of her childhood bedroom and tries to remember how young she must have been when she first knew herself as different from a mother and father and sister who were always in motion, every single one of them always doing, always pushing harder no matter the route they chose to push. Her mother in academia and research, already in a doctoral program by the time she met their father, a man who never completed college. How he clung to a trade instead, to oil changes and tire pressure and speed. How Rhiannon absorbed this. Billie wouldn’t admit to anyone what she knew from the prison’s threadbare sheets, even dreaming her sister on the raceway: that sometimes the Correctional Center felt like a long exhalation. Six years of breathing out despite how hard each day could be, even in a minimum-security prison. Rationed food. Rough guards. Group therapy. The monotony of so many long days. Despite all of it there was still no need to control anything, everything controlled. Eating. Showering. Her only responsibility tending the small prison library’s circulation desk ten hours each week. An inmate assistant to the prison’s single librarian, Barbara, a woman who kept to herself and browsed online most days, her computer the only monitor with authorized internet access. Work Billie was given for her background in libraries despite academic circulation sharing nothing with a one-room collection of donated books. Children’s books. Young adult novels. Books left behind by visiting families. Books dropped off in boxes by well-meaning citizens. Popular magazines. Old issues of National Geographic and Elle and The Economist. Nearly every leisure read in their small collection gifted or discarded, Barbara c
urating everything else through meager state funds and federal guidelines for inmate enrichment. GED preparation. Parenting skills. Drug addiction prevention and sexual abuse recovery. Billie’s single task was to keep tabs on which inmate checked out which book, her only tool a small scanner and sometimes a cart for reshelving books. No picks. No chisels. No hard grip on a steering wheel that controlled an entire engine. Just her palms circling a scanner. How it was enough on days when her shame grew overwhelming. How embarrassed she knew her parents must have been to have one daughter in national races and the other in jail. How the blaze of what landed her in the Correctional Center could distill itself down to something so simple: her hand to the worn spines of donated books.

  Not the flashed pavement of the raceway her sister and father shared.

  Not the heat-scorched rock of her mother’s digging.

  Billie rolls over in the flannel sheets and tries to imagine the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a trip impossible to picture after an interminable block of unchanging days. The quarry where their mother spent most of her professional life and where Billie’s been just once, in ninth grade when her mother took her on a dig while Rhiannon spent her senior year spring break in Atlantic City with her friends. Billie remembers the hazed peaks of mountains, the dry-crackled air. The wide-open desert of Utah, a Martian landscape of snow-packed summits and a single salt lake. When they arrived, Billie knew her mother wanted her to feel a spark of passion, some sense of what she wanted from her life. Rhiannon already racing. So many books squirreled away in Billie’s bedroom. She remembers her father saying sometimes when she picked up books on dinosaurs maybe you’ll be just like your mother and Billie watched her sister pull on her driving suit and felt a cloud of pressure descend, the same pressure she felt standing at the quarry, the thick desert heat bearing down as her mother showed her how to dust red rock and reveal fossilized bone. Fifteen. Billie not even done with her first year of high school. She remembers nothing from the trip except that the quarry was an alleged predator trap, the reason it held the highest concentration of Jurassic bones in the entire world. Where so many Jurassic carnivores were found alongside the herbivores they were drawn to feed upon, a mud pit that caught and smothered hundreds of dinosaurs at once.