The Desert Sky Before Us Read online

  How it ravaged her completely.

  How it turned her animal.

  How Rhiannon kept it locked inside her as she sorted through her mother’s closets.

  I wish it could have been different for you, Rhiannon says.

  Billie looks up. I can’t imagine you had it any better.

  She would’ve visited you again, Billie. I don’t think any of us had any idea it would happen so fast.

  Has Dad helped?

  He’s come down a few times. He’ll help us go through her things, but there’s nothing he wants. They’ve been divorced for sixteen years.

  Rhiannon doesn’t know why she doesn’t mention their mother’s wedding ring, that their father wanted it, that she looked for it in every jewelry box in her mother’s bedroom and couldn’t find it. Billie says nothing and slices her stuffed relleno with the side of her fork.

  I know you’re angry with him, Rhiannon says. You have every right to be. But I think he just wants to help you, make sure you’re transitioning okay.

  Nice of him to think of me now.

  Rhiannon doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know why her father never visited Decatur across six years, even when he drove down to Champaign from Chicago to visit.

  What about Beth? Billie says.

  What about her?

  Is this just a break? For a little while?

  I don’t know what it is, Rhiannon says. She grabs a tortilla chip from the basket and thinks of countless nights on Beth’s couch watching cooking shows and nature documentaries and home improvement reruns. Whether it was losing her mother that drained away any shred of love she had to give or whether it was the final linchpin of a slower collapse. Beth pressing closer and Rhiannon a wall, knowing herself a fortress. Beth asking about her racing. Rhiannon shutting down the conversation every time. How she made her mother promise to never mention it in Beth’s company. Rhiannon doesn’t know what would have happened if her mother had never gotten sick. Reruns and popcorn. If her mother was only an excuse to leave.

  I’m just not good for anyone right now, she says.

  You’re good for me.

  Rhiannon looks up and her sister is watching her.

  I’m exhausted, Billie says. I don’t want to go where we’re going. I want to say goodbye the right way and I don’t want say goodbye at all. But I’m out here. I’m on the road. I’m on the fucking road, Rhee.

  Rhiannon wants to feel something. Wants to take in this moment beyond the stiffness of embracing her sister outside the prison when she picked her up. But she feels only curiosity, nothing else. What it is that makes her sister feel this much.

  What it was that made her once burst into flames.

  Come on. Billie sets down her napkin. Let’s get out of here and get some sleep.

  Rhiannon signals for the check. When they step out to the car, streetlamps hold the only points of light along the dark street. Slumped mailboxes. Tall grass. Wind winnowing through town from the open plains. Rhiannon drives with the windows down, the weather noticeably warmer from the cool damp of central Illinois, until the Mustang comes upon a motel with a neon vacancy sign still blinking. The Salina Inn. Free breakfast. Free Wi-Fi. A pool. Rhiannon pays fifty-five dollars for a double bed, the pool an indoor atrium they pass on their way to the room. When they open their room’s door, there is brown shag carpeting and dim lighting and the stale scent of cigarettes.

  Billie sits on the bed’s edge. I want to go swimming.

  The pool’s probably closed. You brought your swimsuit?

  I found an old one in my closet last night. Of course I brought a swimsuit. And pools are never closed at places like this.

  I didn’t even think to bring a swimsuit.

  Come on, Billie says. Just wear your underwear.

  Rhiannon hesitates. This day already nothing of what she planned. But she pulls off her T-shirt and jeans before she can make herself stop and then they are sneaking back down the hallway toward the atrium, Billie in her bikini, the entire length of her left leg a long scar. Rhiannon’s bra and underwear mismatched. The atrium a wall of humidity when Billie opens the door. A small Jacuzzi in the corner. An enormous water slide tubing into the deep end of the pool. Bright orbs of pool lights. Rhiannon watches as Billie stands at the pool’s edge and regards the diamond glow of the water. Eyes rimmed like she might cry and Rhiannon wonders when Billie last swam. Rhiannon doesn’t wait. She is here. Illinois is behind her right now so she might as well be here. She runs past Billie and jumps into the deep end and feels the rush of water push against her bra and when she surfaces Billie is tunneling down the slide and shooting headfirst into the water and Rhiannon hears the reflex of uncontrolled laughter ricochet off the atrium’s walls right before the water takes her sister in.

  HERNANDEZ, LINDA. “IS CLEAR-AIR TURBULENCE CAUSING BUMPIER FLIGHTS?” TECHNIQUES IN COMMERCIAL AVIATION. ED. FREDERICK GAINES. COLUMBUS, OH: MCGRAW-HILL, 2013. 24. PRINT.

  CALL NUMBER: TL691.8 .G21 2013

  IS CLEAR-AIR TURBULENCE CAUSING BUMPIER FLIGHTS?

  According to a recent study by a team of meteorologists at the University of Florida, incidents of dangerous turbulence on commercial planes causing injury to passengers and crew have been on the rise in the past two years. The study suggests that clear-air turbulence (CAT) is the cause, the meeting of bodies of air traveling at widely different speeds in otherwise cloudless skies. This can cause severe turbulence in commercial planes and is suspected to be the cause of 80 percent of turbulent flights resulting in injury to passengers and flight attendants between 2011 and 2013.

  One reason CAT may be increasing is more flying routes, causing air wakes between planes that cumulatively disturb the atmosphere. Some meteorologists also speculate that climate change may be causing CAT, a warming atmosphere creating greater pockets of varying air temperatures and speeds that could clash. It is still too early to determine whether either of these possibilities are true, or whether this is merely coincidence. Air travel remains completely safe in the continental United States and worldwide.

  38.9111° N, 101.1758° W:

  Russell Springs, KS

  Billie sits on a picnic table outside the Salina Inn, sun sifting through the morning clouds. Wind pushes across the plains and ripples through the cornfields lining the motel’s parking lot. Rhiannon still sleeping. With a cigarette and a paper cup of weak coffee, Billie watches light creep up the Kansas horizon. She can count on one hand the number of Camels she’s smoked across the past six years. Just three—all of which Billie smoked in bathroom stalls—from her first bunkmate, Skylar, a wiry girl with a reputation for smuggling. Decatur’s contraband queen: four years for small-business embezzlement until she was transferred to East Moline a quarter of the way through Billie’s sentence and a sullen arsonist named Tina took Skylar’s place and kept to herself.

  Like with like. Her prison mates called their bunk Arson’s Corner. Prison mates Billie never got to know beyond cursory meals and handing each other soap in the hard-water showers, women Billie sometimes let herself believe she was better than in her worst moments. She’d grown up in a good family. She deserved more after making a single mistake. It was easier to believe the other women had made more than one mistake and that there was such a thing as a good or bad family but when she was honest with herself on dark nights when she couldn’t sleep and a square of sky poked through the small window above her dorm bed, she knew that despite the injustice of Tim getting off without consequence and still standing in front of college classrooms and masquerading as a role model for students that she too had gotten off easy, her sentence lighter than those of the women around her. Arson more violent than drug possession, what so many of the women in Decatur were in for. Minimum security. The prison filled with women swept up in the remnants of the war on drugs, pulled apart from their families just for carrying marijuana. She couldn’t have set a building on fire if anyone else had been inside but in the rage of dragging a can of gasoline across the deser
ted streets, her brow bone broken and her face bleeding down her sweatshirt, she knew on those worst nights in her dorm bed that she couldn’t have been sure. She could have harmed someone. There was so much less harm in selling a drug, a pang that kept her withdrawn from other women and holed away in her own bunk.

  After Tim, she felt no need to know anyone else.

  A couple pushes through the Salina Inn’s lobby doors, a burled man walking five feet ahead of a small woman rolling a suitcase, and Billie can’t help but see it even six years later. The man’s sharp directives. The woman throwing her suitcase in the trunk of a beat-up Geo, the man taking the driver’s seat. Subtle disparities Billie once told herself to disregard. Tim’s razor tongue. Labeling her women friends idiots. Calling her useless when she forgot to take the trash out. What she let herself ignore until the first time he shoved her, a quick blow of violence. His phone ringing one night while he was in the shower, a phone she’d checked but hadn’t picked up. His hair still wet when she told him she didn’t recognize the number, thought nothing of it at all until she was already pressed to the wall with his elbow to her throat. His skin still damp against her neck, eyes hollowed and emotionless with rage. A violation of privacy, he’d screamed, his face unrecognizable so close to hers. Billie watches the couple climb into their car and rolls her tongue on the blunt taste of cigarette ash, the same taste of smoke that crowded her throat before she passed out in the library.

  She’d worked for two years in a circulation position Tim negotiated when he joined Illinois College’s history faculty, an extension from her hourly wages at the University of Illinois’s undergraduate library where she’d bided time for two years after graduation while he finished his dissertation. Then two years of isolation in Jacksonville. No one around but the Schewe Library’s patrons, Illinois College students sliding their textbooks across the circulation desk without looking at her. No acquaintances but Tim’s new colleagues, faculty members who talked over her at parties because she only had a bachelor’s degree. Every friend from high school and college still in Champaign. Her mother, too. Her father and Rhiannon always out on the road. No one there to restrain Tim’s growing stupids and bitches and sluts, no one to tell her they were just words but dangerous ones. How she wanted to tell someone but couldn’t, her sister making sports headlines, her mother publishing groundbreaking articles. The shame of making nothing of herself funneled into the acceptance that she was nothing if Tim kept telling her she was. Jacksonville a hiding place for discolorations. Mounting bruises. The wide wash of empty Illinois cornfields: the relief of anonymity. Until a shove became a cracked tooth became a dislocated shoulder became a knuckle splitting her brow. Until she took to the lamplit streets wild-eyed and bloody, her chest filled with nothing at all. Until she stormed to the library, the only shelter she knew, after stopping at the Marathon gas station and buying one freestanding canister of gasoline.

  A matchbook in her pocket, the only thing she remembered to take from home.

  The library’s key dangling on the chain wallet belted to her jeans.

  How she stood in the center of the stacks hyperventilating, her right eye a bloodshot mess. Five years wasted. Five years bearing the weight of words. Five years of gaining nothing but a knowledge of falcons, some stupid agility with birds. Gasoline in her hands. All around her: books on ornithology. Deep-sea exploration. So many pages of information and every one of them routing her nowhere, only to a fist, only here, her face hidden beneath her hoodie, what she’d pulled over her eyes at the gas station to conceal what was fractured. Blood creeping down her cheek, a velvet stain already permeating the shoulder of her shirt. She pulled the books from the shelves and tore them open and ripped up every page she could find and scattered them around her and shook the gasoline until she felt a hot dampness seeping through her clothes and against her skin.

  Pulled the matchbox from her pocket. Struck it lit.

  How she threw the match and how quickly a flame spread across the floor and swept across the library’s carpet and the scattered books and climbed her shoes and jeans and stretched up her body as she watched the silent streets beyond the library’s bay window and then the world burned clean and dissolved.

  Sometimes from her bunk, quarantined from every other woman to let herself feel the shame and learn from it somehow, Billie watched peregrine falcons wheeling in the sky and wondered if it wasn’t the library’s custodian who first called the police, what the deposition said, but the clerk at the Marathon station: a middle-aged woman Billie saw squint hard beneath her hoodie before handing over change for the gasoline.

  A look Billie came to recognize only later, the look of a woman who knew. The look Billie can’t stop herself from giving the Geo as it pulls out of the Salina Inn’s parking lot.

  The lobby doors open and Rhiannon appears with a cup of coffee, her hair still wet from the motel room’s dimly lit shower.

  Not much in a way of breakfast, she says.

  I’m fine with protein bars in the car, Billie says. And this shit coffee.

  Rhiannon sits on the picnic table beside Billie. I still can’t believe there’s no rain out here.

  Billie follows Rhiannon’s line of sight toward the plains, russet-colored hills that undulate with the gold of sunflower fields. A span unimaginable from the bunk of a prison, a landscape Billie only intuited in the late dark of last night’s arrival. In the morning’s thin sun, the Kansas prairie rolls for miles.

  Ready to hit the road? Billie says.

  Already showered and packed. I wore hiking boots, just in case.

  What do you think we’ll find?

  It’s a drawing of a marine reptile. You can expect a dig site.

  I don’t remember Mom ever coming to Kansas.

  I don’t either. She never studied reptiles. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t here. She had a whole life before we were born.

  Or maybe she was never here. Maybe it’s just some bullshit roadside attraction.

  Rhiannon stands. We’ll find out if we get on the road.

  Billie crushes the last of her cigarette into her empty coffee cup, the air warm enough that she sheds her hoodie for the tank top beneath. She forgets the damaged cells of her shoulders pulling in the prairie’s sun, forgets that her skin gives anyone in the inn’s lobby a reason to look.

  RUSSELL SPRINGS IS farther than Billie guessed, nearly three hours west of Salina. The Mustang passes the sign for Smoky Hill River just before noon, a brief drive south of I-70 and a stone’s throw from the Colorado border. No trees in sight, only wide-open fields of rippling wheat and specklings of soybeans. The GPS leads them to a parking lot for someplace called Smoky Valley Ranch, the sign marking what appears to be a hiking trail leading out into the plains.

  Jesus, Rhiannon says. I’m glad we filled up in Salina.

  The coordinate is a little farther, Billie says. Somewhere out there in the fields.

  Rhiannon looks dubious. To Billie, the plains beyond the windshield are like staring into the sun. So magnificent they hurt. So much space.

  Where do we start? she says.

  Rhiannon nods toward a one-room building beyond the passenger-side window.

  Visitor center, she says. Looks like the trailhead is over there.

  When they approach the building, Billie sees a trail marker and a hiking register. Not a single name penciled in. Inside the visitor center, a lone man sits at a desk reading a mystery paperback, a box fan whirring behind him.

  He looks up when they walk in. What can I do for you ladies?

  Rhiannon speaks first. We think we’re looking for a trail. Fossilized reptiles, we’re guessing. Where can we find those?

  The man closes his book. You’ve come to the right place.

  He pulls out a trail map and hands it to Rhiannon. He says there’s a one-mile loop and a five-mile loop, that both will take them past Cretaceous sea deposits.

  Smoky Hill River was once the sea, he says. The Age of Reptiles. The map tel
ls you more, but you’ll see everything along the way. Not to mention spectacular views of the river valley on both loops.

  Billie hangs back and looks at the center’s displays of the valley’s fossil record and rock sediments. The Chalk Badlands. The entire Smoky Hill River Valley a pocked landscape of bluffs formed by an ancient sea.

  Be sure to take water, the man says. And watch out for rattlesnakes.

  Billie follows Rhiannon from the visitor center toward the trail.

  Rattlesnakes, Billie says. Are you sure we want to do this?

  We’re fine. He probably just has to say that as a precaution. Rhiannon squints down at the map. We should take the shorter loop. It’s probably enough to see what she wants us to see so we can get back on the road. Where are we headed next?

  I didn’t map it yet. Surely Colorado, since we’re so close to the state line.

  Maybe Denver. We can map it when we get back to the car.

  Billie looks across the open plains, the river valley’s badlands poking up through fields of prairie grass. Denver’s only a few hours from here, she says. If that’s where we’re headed, we can still be there by dinner. We have plenty of time.

  Rhiannon sighs. Two weeks, Billie. That’s all I have.

  Yeah, and an extra hour in Kansas isn’t going to make you late for work.

  Rhiannon glances at her. Fine. Five-mile loop?

  Billie holds the GPS in her hands, the coordinates still leading them somewhere out into the fields. They set out on the longer trail, Rhiannon in front against the valley’s high winds while Billie follows with the map.

  This says we could see prairie chickens or swift foxes, she says.