The Desert Sky Before Us Page 3

  Billie sits up, feels the wetness of her still-damp hair. Glances at the rain-fogged windows, a streetlamp on Grove Street pressing light against the panes. She sits at her mother’s desk and runs a palm across the stegosaurus metacarpal, bone velveted in layers of sediment. She notices the back of her own hand, still unblemished, skin that smooths up toward her elbow before starting to pucker. Third-degree burns rivuleting her forearm, breaking into rippled waves up her shoulder and across the left half of her back. The left side of her abdomen equally raked, her left leg a long scar of thick skin. A doctor told her postgraft that she’d been found lying on her right side, passed out on the Schewe Library’s floor from smoke inhalation. Books scattered around her. Blistered pages. Burned bindings and ashen lettering. An overnight custodian had pulled up to the library lot and seen smoke billowing from the windows and called the fire department and Billie wonders even still what police made of the black eye, how doctors justified the dragged cut down the side of her face unaffected by fire. The side pressed into the library floor’s carpet, unburned. The side that forced her from Tim’s apartment to the library’s doors.

  Billie picks up the metacarpal, holds its surprising weight. Her mother’s tools filling a room she no longer fills, a room Billie once filled, a room holding nothing more of either of their dreaming. She hears Rhiannon walking around downstairs, the soft creak of the hardwood floors. A home that across six years still smells the same, cedar and cinnamon bread, her mother’s baking trapped in the floorboards and the walls.

  And in the closet: raptor-size anklets. A single hood. Jesses and a bow perch and a lure line. Her falconry equipment. What her family didn’t let Tim keep when they collected her things. And Alabama: Billie’s red-tailed hawk. She’d cut the bird’s line. Watched the hawk hesitate only a moment before taking noiselessly to the dark, before Billie herself took to the street toward the library. Across so many nights watching the small window above her prison bed for the faint blink of stars, Billie felt the phantom grip of Alabama’s talons still grasping her arm through the raptor glove.

  She leaves the closet closed. Listens for the sound of another voice downstairs. Wonders if Rhiannon will have Beth over before they leave for two weeks. A woman Billie’s never met, an entire relationship begun while Billie was in Decatur, so much of her sister lost to a chasm of time. Billie hears nothing, just the sound of her sister’s weight moving across the floor, and reaches down into the Amelia Earhart bag her mother brought to Decatur on her last prison visit four months ago. What she slid across the table in the Correctional Center’s visiting room just after she was diagnosed. What once held Billie’s doll clothes. What the warden let Billie keep, her sentence nearing its close.

  What contained a GPS device.

  What contained a journal filled with coordinates, one on each page.

  Go to these places, her mother said. Don’t look ahead in the pages. Don’t ask questions. Please, just do as I say. A road trip, her mother said, immediately upon Billie’s release. The coordinates locations she wanted her daughters to visit along their route.

  Billie took the journal, a small notebook no bigger than a Moleskine.

  One page at a time as you find each location, her mother said. For now, just the first page.

  Billie opened the book. On the first page: no notes, no map, no indication of city or state. Just a coordinate, latitude and longitude, and a single drawing beside it. A drawing of a dinosaur. A thin sketch. The only page she promised her mother she’d look at until they were well on the road.

  Her mother didn’t have to say it. Billie knew Rhiannon didn’t know about the GPS or the journal. She guessed her mother had her reasons, ones Billie wanted to protect. And Billie hated to admit that it felt good having a secret to keep, to not be the one family member on the outside looking in.

  Their mother had squeezed the journal into her hands. Billie didn’t have to ask why her mother wanted them to drive. She’d seen the news on the airplanes in the Correctional Center’s television room. But she didn’t know anything of what these coordinates were, what her mother intended for them to see along the way. Billie took the digital GPS. She took the journal. She took them pretending she would see her mother again. She’d let her mother walk away through the metal detector and the double-paned glass, to a quick decline in a hospital bed that only took four weeks.

  What began as a secret was now a promise.

  Whatever it was their mother wanted for them, Billie would see that they did it.

  She sits at her mother’s desk and opens the journal and runs her hand over the ink-stained coordinates of the first page. Her mother’s handwriting a precision across years of holding picks and brushes, a penmanship grown blurred with radiation and a tumor’s pressure, her brain a bomb all these years just waiting to explode. And in the final two weeks, a tumor so large it pushed against her frontal lobe and shut down her motor control and slurred her speech. Billie spoke to her by a wall-hung phone only twice after her final visit, both times her voice barely audible. Billie. The syllables smeared. Billie. You are so loved. What Billie couldn’t bring herself to say back if it meant the last time, the word an unaccustomed stone in her throat. Billie hanging up the hallway’s phone, pressing her forehead to the receiver. She glances out the window at the evening rain and imagines the funeral at Greenlawn, the blooming March irises, Rhiannon and their father standing in bone-wet cold. Her fingers find her mother’s tools upon the desk, rock picks and trimming chisels and tiny hammers. How she wants to dig them into her skin. Break the earth of her body. Excavate the scars. Exhume everything she’s done that kept her from being there in the cemetery.

  Billie looks at the journal’s first page. The first coordinate. A northern degree followed by a western degree, latitude and longitude, neither of which mean anything to Billie without a map. A small sketch of a Tyrannosaurus rex beneath it. A stick drawing. Her mother’s only hint of what they might find when they reach this first stop, one Billie will map in the morning once they’re on the road. Billie knows Rhiannon will balk. This part of the plan she wasn’t let in on, this change in their route. Rhiannon’s rigidity surely their mother’s reason for giving Billie the journal instead.

  Billie runs a palm up her left arm, the skin a rough ridgeline beneath her fingers. Its similarity to a stegosaurus’s back the only bridge Billie could forge between her mother’s life and hers in the end. She imagines her father in Chicago, over two hours from Champaign-Urbana, gone from their childhood home for over sixteen years. Divorced when Billie was a sophomore in high school, just a year after she visited the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry with her mother. Her father’s voice: one she hasn’t heard since she left for Decatur. A voice Rhiannon expects her to speak to in the morning if he calls.

  Billie curls into the sheets and hears the hum of the television downstairs through the floorboards. The past six years: a break from the pressure to do anything at all, but also a long tenure of contemplation. That if she’d done something meaningful and good with her life, she wouldn’t have gone to prison. Wouldn’t have been living in Jacksonville. Wouldn’t have met Tim. What she would have been instead: following her own path just like her mother, her sister, her father.

  A THICK SCENT of coffee drags Billie from sleep, a knot of pain pulsing in her back against the couch’s pullout bar. Intermittent sun speckles through the window behind a wall of heavy clouds but there’s no sound of rain. Rhiannon is already dressed when Billie heads down to the kitchen in her pajama shirt and underwear, sleep hazed enough to forget the pocked skin along her left leg until Rhiannon’s eyes catch upon her bare thigh.

  Billie stops. Sorry. I’ll grab some pants.

  No, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

  Billie climbs down the last step, the first time she’s felt self-conscious about her body in years, her prison mates used to her scars. Billie remembers swapping clothes with Rhiannon in high school, pulling off ripped jeans and exchanging tees, an effortless undress
ing that here in the kitchen feels all at once guarded. Rhiannon hands her a mug of coffee. Then a bowl of yogurt, a plate of eggs. Strawberries. Blueberries with cream.

  I figured you couldn’t get any of this in Decatur, Rhiannon says. She sits down at the kitchen table with her own plate. Billie sees she’s waited to eat though she’s been up awhile, her hair nearly dry but the tips still wet. Jeans and a tank top. Ready for a long drive. Billie takes a bite of eggs scrambled with cilantro and avocado and Sriracha and sour cream. Nothing stale. Not four-day-old bread, not near-sour milk.

  Thanks for making breakfast, she says.

  Rhiannon picks up her fork. The car’s packed. Water, protein bars. I put a bunch of trail mix and fruit in the backseat. I just have a backpack in the trunk. There’s plenty of space in there for whatever you want to bring.

  Do you have music?

  Rhiannon gestures toward the garage. My phone’s already hooked up. I made a huge playlist. You can add tracks if you want.

  Billie shakes her head. She and Rhiannon haven’t traded music since high school. The benefits of an older sister. How it made you cultured. Let you know Joy Division, NWA, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos. Their parents also record collectors. Their names the product of their parents’ old albums. Rhiannon: their mother’s obsession with Fleetwood Mac. And Billie: her father’s love for Michael Jackson, shortened from Billie Jean.

  Sleep okay? Rhiannon asks.

  Like a rock. Billie sips her coffee. Are you seeing Beth before we go?

  We broke up.

  Billie looks up. When did that happen?

  Just after the funeral. I moved out.

  Billie doesn’t know what to say, her bare legs beginning to prickle with cold. The strangeness of a once-familiar house and an empty bedroom. A girlfriend she’s never met but felt she knew through anecdotes and stories every time Rhiannon visited.

  Are you okay?

  I’m fine. We’re still friends. Or whatever else in between.

  Billie wants her sister to say more but she doesn’t. Rhiannon stands and the telephone rings, the landline their mother insisted on keeping. She knows who it is by the tone of Rhiannon’s voice as she picks up the phone. When Billie finally looks up, Rhiannon is watching her, her hand holding out the receiver.

  Billie doesn’t want to take it.

  Out on bail? her father says when she takes the phone.

  Just getting ready to leave, she says.

  About a two-week trip?

  Two weeks. No more, no less.

  Just wanted to tell you I’m glad you’re out, he says and Billie hears the central Illinois twang, the nasal vowels and the truncated syllables, the yer instead of you’re despite sixteen years in the city. The Chicagoland Speedway his home track since it opened just after Billie graduated from high school. Where he moved full-time once it was clear there would be no reconciliation postdivorce, where he still works servicing cars and venturing out on a road team for traveling races.

  You girls be careful out there, he says. What with the weather and all.

  We’re not girls anymore, Billie says. A small grenade she can’t stop herself from throwing. Rhiannon looks up from washing dishes at the sink.

  Be that as it may, her father says, just be careful out there.

  Billie hands the phone back to Rhiannon and heads up the staircase to get dressed and hears her sister letting their father know where they’ll be and when. His voice nothing like Tim’s and yet the Illinois drawl flames a heat inside her that rises with each stairstep she takes. Tim all Illinois, born and bred. Their relationship a tilted seesaw. An imbalance that crowded the walls of the prison, that became a motor for never again. The dull ache of a black eye. The sharp blow of a fist splitting skin. The can of gasoline that would burn everything down.

  WHEN BILLIE PULLS her suitcase out to the garage, Rhiannon is standing in the entryway of the raised garage door, the sky oystered in clouds behind her. Billie hoists her suitcase into the trunk and keeps a daypack slung over her shoulder.

  There are water bottles in the backseat, Rhiannon says. And I put two thermoses of coffee in the front cupholders. We can refill them at motels and campsites. I have enough money for motels all the way, but I packed a small tent just in case. Just let me check the house one last time. You have everything?

  Billie nods and Rhiannon heads back into the kitchen while Billie throws her hiking daypack in the passenger seat. At the bottom, her mother’s journal and the GPS device. Her sister’s phone already hooked up and mapped west. Sunglasses in the visors. Water bottles in the backseat of the two-door coupe beside a soft-pack cooler filled with apples and trail mix. Billie forgets how often Rhiannon has seen the road. She glances around the garage: so many tools, bags of soil, clay pots. Two road bikes suspended upside-down from hooks screwed into the garage’s ceiling. And on the far side of the garage, two racing helmets hung against the wall.

  Billie recognizes the one on the left: a helmet their father gave Rhiannon when she first started racing in Soap Box Derby events, painted in lightning bolts and coated with dust. The one on the right, Billie’s never seen: a larger helmet lacquered in constellations and covered in cobwebs when she lifts it from the wall.

  Is this your helmet? Billie asks when Rhiannon returns to the garage.

  Rhiannon looks up, her face unreadable. It was, she says. I haven’t used that one in years.

  Where do you keep all your stuff now? Your suit and your gear?

  It’s still at Beth’s apartment. Rhiannon locks the kitchen door behind her. I’ll get it back when you and I return. I keep some stuff at the raceway too.

  Are you still at the Vermilion Speedway?

  I practice there. Chicago’s better, but I haven’t gone up the last few months.

  You sure two weeks away is okay for the racing schedule?

  Rhiannon drops her hands. It’s fine, Billie. To be honest, I’ve taken a step back from circuits this summer with everything that’s happened. I need this break too.

  Billie places the helmet back on the wall’s hook. Rhiannon climbs into the driver’s seat and turns on her phone’s map and says nothing more of the raceway and Billie lowers herself into the passenger seat before Rhiannon backs the car out of the driveway. Billie drags her fingers against the passenger window’s glass as they pull away from Grove Street, their childhood home receding in the rearview mirror.

  HEAVY FOG DUSTS the flatlands as they drive west on Interstate 72, stratus clouds resting low on the cornfields. Billie knows this land stretched in every direction from the Decatur Correctional Center’s prison yard where she sometimes went for short walks, the stark view impeded only by the fence’s whorls of barbed wire. She knows the way the seasons shifted beyond the prison’s fence from summer to winter and back to summer, the muscle memory of a girlhood spent entirely in central Illinois. She can tell by the corn’s height how much of summer is left. In June: empty fields, pointillistic rows of planted seeds. Short stalks in July. Waving greens by August, taller than every high school boyfriend Billie ever had. She remembers the sharp cut of corn silk, tassels caught in her clothing running through the fields as a teenager with some boy, shirts caked with dirt from the silt of stalks and from lying down in the high grass. Mosquito bites and sweat. The scent of citronella and aloe. The droned whine of cicadas across the fields of August, the Illinois sky a broken-open eggshell above them, a landscape Billie memorized even amid the alcohol haze and cigarette smoke of high school. Her brain a map of hills and patches of oak trees and undulations of rolling corn, an atlas of childhood that became the learned requirements of a falconer releasing a red-tailed hawk: to know the height of trees, the respite of clearings, what bramble might snag a bird if it didn’t return when called. Rhiannon’s car passes a field of wind turbines, bone-white blades cutting circles in the clouds, and Billie recognizes the same turbines she sometimes saw from her prison window if the sky cleared just right. They are nearing Decatur. Billie realizes the coordinates of their
mother’s journal will determine their route west and determine it quickly. She reaches down for the journal in her bag before Rhiannon turns to see what she’s doing.

  What’s that? Rhiannon asks.

  I wanted to wait until we were on the road, Billie says.

  For what? What did you bring?

  Billie opens the journal and glances at the first coordinates. She doesn’t know enough of latitudes and longitudes to know where these coordinates point. And the T. rex drawing: Billie has no clue what it means. She rummages in the daypack and pulls out the GPS.

  Billie, I have the map. I know where we’re going.

  Billie presses the coordinates into the handheld device and it beeps, their destination located. The center of St. Louis. Billie looks up and sees an iridescent-green road sign marking only eleven miles to Springfield, where they’ll have to turn if they want to change their route and head south.

  Pull over, Billie says.