The Desert Sky Before Us Read online

  Do you think Mom ever came here? Rhiannon says.

  I doubt it. Not her style. She wouldn’t slum it here.

  It’s not like she came from money. And she met Dad during those years.

  Yeah, that was a phase. One she shouldn’t have bet on by marrying him.

  Rhiannon notices the bar’s pool table, empty of billiard balls. She tries to imagine her parents here, a bar they likely never set foot in. The dynamics between them always tenuous, how she and Billie grew up well aware of their father’s discomfort around their mother’s academia. How Rhiannon sensed his pride in their mother’s research as much as she saw his misgivings, his lack of education a cross he bore against their mother’s doctoral degree even though she, too, was from small-town Illinois, the only member of her family to graduate from college. Rhiannon remembers her mother saying that her parents came to her PhD graduation, a world they didn’t understand. Her doctoral robe, bunches of fabric they called her wizard cape. The fact of their showing up good enough. Rhiannon wondered sometimes if her mother simply grew accustomed to tough love. Rhiannon saw how her father showed it: your mother can’t be at your school play because of course she’s working late again. Rhiannon wonders if she ever did the same to Beth, a learned response. Wonders if Beth’s brought anyone over since Rhiannon left. She looks at Billie. Knows Tim is surely still somewhere in Jacksonville.

  Was Tim a phase? Rhiannon asks.

  Billie keeps her eyes forward. I’m not going to talk about him.

  You never do. You never have.

  Billie glances at Rhiannon. What does it matter?

  Because I’m supposed to look out for you. I don’t want you to repeat any mistakes. And I don’t know if you consider him a mistake.

  You really think you’re looking out for me? By bringing this up? Why now?

  Rhiannon picks at her plate of fries. She doesn’t know why she’s bringing it up now. She watches drops of condensation slide down her pint glass and knows it isn’t Billie she’s interested in needling. The fire a fluke, an act of desperation. A mistake Billie won’t repeat. Rhiannon doesn’t know what happened between Tim and Billie, if he simply disowned her after she went to prison. Rhiannon knows only that she’s irritated.

  Why didn’t you tell me about the journal?

  Where she wants anger in her voice, there is only hurt.

  Billie sets down her beer. I just wanted to get out here with you. I wanted that first. And before you think worse of her, don’t think she was hiding anything.

  How can I not think that? She knew about this for nearly four months and said nothing to me.

  You think this is all about me, a funeral for my benefit. I guarantee you, it’s not. She didn’t say much when she came to Decatur, but she did say this—that you were wrecked. That you needed to get the fuck out of Illinois.

  I am out of Illinois. I’ll be out of Illinois for two weeks.

  And isn’t this better? Here we are.

  We could’ve had beers in northern Missouri, Rhiannon says and thinks of the route she planned straight across Missouri and up through Nebraska. She thinks of the Gateway Raceway, the blade of driving past it. But here in this bar, there’s a calm in returning to St. Louis that she doesn’t expect. Where they visited their grandparents. The hum of baseball on the bar’s television the same as every Cardinal series they watched as kids. The burned melt of cheese fries, the hops and carbonation of beer. Beth always drank whiskey. Rhiannon hasn’t had a beer in years, hasn’t left the state of Illinois in months. And Billie. Her sister here beside her. Her sister here.

  What do you think this means? Rhiannon says. The park. The T. rex statue.

  I have no fucking idea.

  I’ve only got two weeks off, Billie. And we need to get back within fourteen days for your first therapy appointment. There’s no leeway on that.

  Billie nods. We’ll be back in time. Even with a different route.

  Rhiannon sips her beer and watches a foul ball sail into the stands on-screen.

  WHEN THEY LEAVE the bar, the sky has darkened in whorls of green and gray, a thunderstorm rolling in from the west. Though it means more rain, the low sound of approaching thunder comforts Rhiannon. What’s been missing in Illinois. The summer thunderstorms she remembers, the lightning and heavy clouds of a Midwestern childhood. The interruption of television broadcasts for weather updates. The front porch where she sat with her father watching cumulonimbus clouds push in. Her mother inside but watching from the window, Billie beside her, how no one ever retreated to the basement no matter how many storm sirens screamed. How thunderstorms were better than television. How thick drops of rain gusted in sideways, blowing open blinds, wetting window screens and splashing the pavement beyond the driveway. How long it’s been since Rhiannon’s seen anything but gray rain and anemic clouds.

  Think we should wait it out? Billie says as they approach the Mustang, still parked near the Science Center. I know you’re nervous about the weather given the news.

  We’re not flying, Rhiannon says, the first lack of worry she’s felt since hearing the news. I haven’t had the chance to drive through a storm all summer.

  The wind picks up and Billie glances toward the T. rex. Do you think there’s anything we’re missing? We don’t even know why she led us here.

  Rhiannon climbs into the car. We looked. I don’t think there’s anything here but a reminder. A place to start.

  Billie situates herself in the passenger seat. What kind of reminder?

  I don’t know. This is where she spent her childhood. This is where her career began. And this is where we began too. Our entire family. Where she met Dad.

  She didn’t study the T. rex.

  But it’s on our route. And these are the only outdoor dinosaurs in the whole city. Besides, she studied them a little by looking at every dinosaur’s mating habits.

  Billie watches out the window as Rhiannon follows the road out of Forest Park, trees whipping leaves to the pavement. A few stragglers remain on the paved trail. Two runners. A lone biker pedaling into the wind. Rhiannon watches a garbage can blow over and roll into the street and pulls onto the highway headed straight west into Missouri. I-70: the same interstate she took so many times with her father. Lightning flashes beyond the windshield and splinters down the horizon, a bolt of electricity breaking apart a sky that has gone almost black.

  What’s the next stop? Rhiannon says. Whatever it is, we still need to be in Utah within the next few days.

  Billie opens the journal, grabs the GPS. The sky splits open with rain and the windshield wipers kick into high gear and Rhiannon feels a wave of sadness, the St. Louis skyline receding in the rearview mirror. Where their mother studied. Where their father first built his racing career. Where she began hers only years after she first taped a picture of Wendell Scott to her bedroom wall, a page she copied from a library book. The Gateway Raceway where she first hurtled her car across 110-degree asphalt toward a finish line no one thought she could cross.

  Smoky Hill River, Billie says. Russell Springs in Kansas, right along I-70.

  What the hell is in Russell Springs?

  Like I would know.

  How far?

  Over six hundred miles. Almost nine hours.

  Rhiannon glances at the dashboard clock. 3:04 p.m. We might be able to make it, she says. We’ll see how far we can get. Is there a drawing by the coordinate?

  Some kind of fish. Something big. With fins and teeth.

  Fins? We’re in the middle of the fucking plains.

  A fossil is my best guess.

  Rhiannon sighs. Wonders why their mother couldn’t make legible notes, couldn’t have just told them where they’re headed and why.

  Whatever, she says. Put on any music you want. We’ll be in the car awhile.

  Billie chooses Bob Dylan. Highway 61 Revisited, far mellower than what Rhiannon expects. Billie’s childhood bedroom once filled with Black Flag posters and Minor Threat LPs. The jangle of Dylan’
s harmonica fills the closed car. Gusts of wind push against the side of the car and the St. Louis suburbs thin out to waves of green hills. Billie sinks into the passenger seat and traces her finger along the water droplets streaking the window and Rhiannon watches the road ahead through the downpour, thunder rattling the earth around them, the red taillights of the car ahead their only guide west.

  THE STORMS ABATE along Interstate 70 just as Rhiannon passes signs for the University of Missouri. Signs she passed along this same highway during what would have been her college years, spent instead taking piecemeal online courses and driving every major roadway chasing NASCAR series wins. Rhiannon knows the I-70 Speedway just past Columbia, Missouri’s only asphalt oval where she sometimes raced in regional competitions. Billie still in high school then. Billie now asleep in the passenger seat beside her, lulled by the rain. The Dylan album long over, replaced by the in-and-out static of public radio. The weather report: clear skies in Kansas City but reports of a tornado touching down in Owensville, sixty miles behind them. The sky is volatile, the reporter says before segueing from weather to more coverage of the downed plane and Rhiannon lets the words ring through her brain in the car’s silence. Her mother’s unthinkable decline. The hurried end of her relationship with Beth. Billie’s release. The journal. Rhiannon’s hands grip the wheel, the only semblance she feels of any control at all. The radio drones: major airports closed. Air travel suspended. A black box recovered in northern Arizona, the latest development. Officials investigating its recordings for any link to the crashes of six other planes worldwide across the past four months.

  The landscape rolls in half-lit waves beyond the window as Rhiannon listens to the broadcast’s summary of the other six planes. Black boxes have been pulled from four of the crashes, every one of them holding the voices of pilots shouting sudden clear-air disturbances. Unprecedented turbulence. Air currents gusting beyond the most modern advances in aerodynamic technology. Voices of surprise then a quick cutting off, what was reported across all of the recovered boxes.

  Billie shifts in the passenger seat beside her, still asleep, and Rhiannon recalls the last commercial flight she took. Always white-knuckled, always a nervous flyer. She specified a window seat every time to watch the clouds and know why the plane jolted each time it passed through a mass of white. A race car so contained, one lone driver. The commercial plane a conglomerate of so many factors beyond anyone’s control. The ground crew: so many different people who oversaw wings and lights and fuel and wheels, so many different places where one thing could go wrong. The same as a pit crew, though she knew every single person on her team. The flight attendants anonymous, the throngs of people shuttling in, a pilot in the cockpit she’d never meet. Air traffic control. The strange dings and bells in flight. Rhiannon hated everything about flying and had taken to sitting in the window seat unable to read or do anything at all, watching only for coming clouds and for any small movement a plane could make.

  Her mother knew this. Her mother teased her. So accustomed to flying multiple times each month to dig sites and conferences. Rhiannon always drove between raceways but had been flying since Billie’s incarceration, an occupational hazard of selling textbooks. And then her mother’s chiding tapered off once her own travel grew bumpier in the past few years, flights west filled with turbulence.

  Rhiannon’s last flight: five months ago. A trip between Chicago and New York to meet with sales executives at the textbook corporation’s headquarters. A two-hour flight, a windless day. Completely smooth through clear skies until the plane shook everyone on board halfway in, the man beside her roused from sleep, the teenager in front of her pulling headphones from his ears. The plane dropping swift as a diving bird, overhead bins rattling open, the drink cart crashing down the aisle, the flight attendant shouting, the bellwether Rhiannon watched to know what was routine and what was not. Her stomach hollowing out as the plane blew sideways and the man beside her braced the seat in front of him, no more than ten seconds of extreme turbulence, but in those ten seconds before the pilot gained control and the plane leveled off and the flight deck issued an apology, Rhiannon was absolutely certain the plane was going down and that she would die in the air so far from a planet that held everyone she loved.

  When the plane landed, wheels gripping the runway like talons, Rhiannon promised herself she would never fly again.

  One month later, the first of seven planes crashed to the earth.

  Signs for Kansas City shimmer along the road. As they near the state line, the thunderstorm’s thinning clouds break the last of the day’s glow into shards. Billie sleeps beside her and Rhiannon watches the western sky above the highway and lets herself think of her mother. Feels for a moment what her mother built into this trip for her: not just a second funeral for Billie, but a car. Transportation without fear in a vehicle that feels like home. Her hands to the wheel as if her mother were guiding her across the Midwest.

  WHEN RHIANNON HEARS Billie wake, the sun has set but the sky remains streaked with fading ribbons of light beyond the windshield. Billie rubs her face, reaches into the backseat, and pulls out an aluminum bottle of water.

  How long was I sleeping? Billie says.

  Almost all the way across Missouri.

  Billie squints out the window. Where the fuck are we?

  The middle of Kansas. We passed Topeka a while ago.

  Rhiannon surveys the land spilling all around the car. Land for miles. The Great Plains. A browned panorama of small badlands and pocked fields of dimly lit sunflowers. Rhiannon glances at her sister and wonders what this looks like to her, these roadways a diagram burned into Rhiannon’s brain. She realizes that even before Billie went to Decatur, she’d never lived beyond the state of Illinois, not even in college and the following years in Jacksonville. Only trips here and there. The quarry at fifteen. Family vacations. Billie watches out the window and Rhiannon feels a brief stab of jealousy for a single horrible moment that her sister can see this land for the first time.

  How far are we from Smoky Hill River? Billie asks.

  About two hours, according to the GPS. It’s nearing nine o’clock. How hungry are you?

  Very. We could stop at the next town for the night.

  The next biggest town is Salina. Fifteen miles down the highway. Might be our best bet. We can head over to the river in the morning.

  Salina, Billie repeats. I’ve never even heard of it.

  When they pull off the highway at one of Salina’s three exits, a strip mall greets them past the first stoplight. One storefront is illuminated in a line of darkened windows, its neon sign advertising a restaurant: La Cantina. Rhiannon glances farther down the street and sees only darkness.

  How about Mexican food? Rhiannon asks.

  Billie nods. Mexican it is.

  Inside the restaurant, they slide into a vinyl booth and a server drops a plastic wicker basket of tortilla chips on the table. Rhiannon orders only water, Billie a margarita rimmed with salt. Soft music pipes through the speakers above them and above the restaurant’s only two other patrons, a couple populating a booth in the back.

  How does it feel to be out here? Rhiannon says.

  What, you mean on the road?

  On the road. And outside of Illinois.

  I always knew I wouldn’t be in there forever. Billie breaks a chip in half and dips it in salsa. You’d be surprised how fast six years goes, even with nothing to do but wait. Even still, this feels crazy.

  The pang of jealousy sharpens in Rhiannon’s chest. How so?

  All of it. Those coordinates. The land. How fucking wide open it is. How I never noticed. Billie runs a hand through her short hair. And Mom, she says softly. How somehow the land looks different. How I know she’s not here.

  Rhiannon thinks of the St. Louis skyline fading in the rearview mirror.

  How did you do it? Billie says.

  Rhiannon doesn’t know what Billie means as their food arrives. Two plates of chile rellenos. The ser
ver walks away and Billie’s voice softens.

  How did you stand watching her go?

  The question is a blow, one Rhiannon could have anticipated sometime across the drive, but still it beats the breath from her lungs. The same seizing she felt beside the hospital bed while her mother slept and the television droned on the wall above them. In the flickering light Rhiannon felt the world already absent. A dropping out of every scaffolding the earth held. A quiet panic from the bedside chair as her mother’s fingers worked dig sites through the dreaming of her sleep, a bricked silence that pressed against the room’s windows and the ceiling and the floor.

  I didn’t, Rhiannon says. I didn’t stand it all.

  At least you got to say goodbye.

  There is no such thing.

  Billie says nothing, the restaurant’s music the only sound between them.

  Rhiannon glances at Billie. What happened when she visited you last?

  Nothing happened. She gave me the journal, the GPS, told me what to do with them. Then she left when visiting hours were over. There was no fanfare. We both pretended like it wasn’t the last time.

  Billie sips her margarita and Rhiannon feels the tip of a knife needle her chest. Billie watching their mother walk away. Billie pressing her hand to the visiting room’s glass window once hours were over, what she’d done so many times after Rhiannon came to see her and time was up. Any jealousy she felt dissipates. Rhiannon pushes her fork across her plate and wonders which of them had it worse. Whether it was harder to pretend not to say goodbye, Billie knowing for sure she’d never see their mother again. Or whether it was harder to watch her waste away, the chemo treatments, the appetite loss and the brittleness of bone and the falling away of hair in chunks.