The Desert Sky Before Us Read online

  What about the fossils? Rhiannon shouts. What kind of fossils are we looking for?

  This says large turtles and sharks. And giant clams.

  We’re not looking for clams. What dinosaurs?

  Billie runs her finger down the map’s list. Mosasaurs and plesiosaurs.

  Like I know what those are.

  Cretaceous dinosaurs, Billie says, what she remembers from the science wing of the Schewe Library, books she opened on slow afternoons. Section QK. A decimal system she memorized from working at three different libraries.

  These fossils are more recent than Jurassic fossils, she calls to Rhiannon. Even if this wasn’t Mom’s era, maybe she studied these first.

  She keeps walking, the wind whipping prairie grass against her exposed legs. Rhiannon passes back water and trail mix. A small toad hops across the dusted path. Billie feels sweat beading at her temples, the first she’s broken in years beyond the squats and sit-ups of her prison bunk. The trail begins to climb, a steady creep to the edge of the river’s dust-brown bluffs. Rhiannon reaches the precipice first, an expanse overlooking the valley of western Kansas. Cutting through the bluffs below: the Smoky Hill River. Larger and wider than Billie anticipated, a rushing oasis through the dry prairie. Rhiannon steps up to a small wooden placard staked into the dirt.

  Cretaceous formations, she reads aloud. This must be what we’re looking for.

  The GPS beeps in Billie’s hands, the coordinates reached almost squarely. This is where we’re supposed to be, she says. Do you see anything?

  Rhiannon kneels at the edge of the ravine and runs her hand over the rock. The sun breaks clear of the thinning clouds overhead, a full sun Billie hasn’t seen in months from the dreary gray of Illinois. Light bounces off the reddish-brown rock of the river valley and Billie looks down to see Rhiannon crawling on her knees along the bluff’s edge.

  This looks like some kind of reptilian fossil, she says. She skirts her hands across a wide swath of puckered rock. Billie crouches beside her and traces the ridges. The faint outline of four fins, a round body. A neck stretching out long and far, the marine version of a brontosaurus. Billie glances at the trail map.

  Plesiosaur, she says. Exactly where the map says it is.

  Rhiannon sits beside the fossil’s outline. And Mom’s drawing?

  The journal is back in the car burrowed in Billie’s daypack, but she remembers the contours of her mother’s sketch.

  This is it, Billie says.

  Do you see anything? Can you remember anything she ever said about marine fossils or Kansas?

  Billie sits beside her sister and lets her legs dangle off the bluff’s edge. I don’t remember anything, she says. She went on a million digs. She could’ve been here anytime. She could’ve even come out here when she was in graduate school.

  Rhiannon squints down at the water. Goddamn, it’s hot out here.

  Did you ever think you’d say that after all the rain in Illinois?

  Rhiannon leans back, tilts her face to the sun. It feels nice.

  Billie takes in the sweep of their view. Red bluffs. Marbled blue sky. The sun diamonding off the rush of the river. She closes her eyes and listens. No noise. No cars, no highways. No guards yelling. No chatter of dorm mates. Only the water’s liquid rush and the wind’s pulse and the rise and fall of Rhiannon’s breath beside her.

  What do you think this means? Rhiannon says.

  Billie doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. Wants only to sit with the sun warming her face way out here. Rhiannon stands and returns to the staked placard and Billie hears her hiking boots scuff through the dirt path, pebbles and gravel. Hears her footsteps stop at the sign, her metal water bottle clanging open, her breath catching and sharpening.

  Billie, come here.

  Billie turns and Rhiannon is crouching in the dirt and pushing her hands through short tufts of crabgrass and pulling out what looks like a small ammunition box. When Billie reaches her, Rhiannon is holding the box in her palms.

  What is that? Billie says.

  I don’t know. There’s some weight to it. I think there’s something inside.

  Do you think it’s for us?

  Billie, I don’t know.

  Is it locked? Can you open it?

  Rhiannon presses against the box’s plastic, a small latch that quickly pops open. She lifts the plastic lid and looks inside and Billie sees a folded piece of paper on top.

  What is it? Billie asks.

  Rhiannon unfolds the paper and Billie sees what’s scrawled on the sheet before Rhiannon can speak. A drawing of a reptile alongside a set of coordinates. The exact latitude and longitude plugged into the GPS in Billie’s hands.

  Jesus Christ.

  Rhiannon looks at her. Did you know about this?

  I would have told you if I did. She only gave me the journal.

  Rhiannon glances down at the box. There’s something else in here.

  She sets down the piece of paper, holds up the plastic box.

  Unearths a locket on a short golden chain.

  What the hell is that? Billie says.

  Rhiannon pulls the chain from the box. I’ve seen this before. I know what this is.

  What? Billie says. What the fuck is it? Her voice sharper than she wants. Rhiannon peels open the locket, a gold disc no bigger than a quarter. A locket Billie remembers seeing her mother drop into her nightstand jewelry box at some point across their childhood. Rhiannon sits in the grass, her jeans chalked with dirt. She hands the locket to Billie. Inside, on one half: a picture of their mother as a teenager. Her hair dark and full, her cheeks rose bulbs. The other side their aunt. Two years younger than their mother, a cherubic-faced adolescent.

  That’s Aunt Sue, Billie says dumbly. Her mother’s only sibling, an aunt Billie hasn’t seen since Thanksgiving the year she moved to Jacksonville. Living now in Dallas. She glances at Rhiannon and sees she’s near tears.

  How is this here? Rhiannon whispers. How the hell did she get this out here?

  Maybe a colleague. If she planned this months ago, maybe someone on regular dig sites to these places.

  There’s no way she could’ve come here herself. Rhiannon sits up. Fuck. This has to mean we missed something in St. Louis.

  What, you mean another box?

  Of course that’s what I mean. And we’ve already fucked it up.

  Tim’s brother lives in St. Louis. At least he did when we were in Jacksonville. If it really matters, I could call him. I could have him go check for us.

  Rhiannon wipes dust from her face. Don’t do that.

  He was always nice. I’m sure he would do it. Especially given the circumstances.

  Mom had this in her jewelry box when we were kids, Rhiannon says. I remember asking her once where she got it. She said Aunt Sue had one too.

  Did you see her? At the funeral?

  Rhiannon nods. She stood right beside me.

  Billie looks across the river bluffs, the jeweled water cutting down through the valley. What do you think it means? she says. Why this? Why here?

  I have no idea.

  Maybe we could ask Aunt Sue. She’s the one who was around Mom most in their younger years. Maybe this locket means we should call her.

  Rhiannon shakes her head. I didn’t know Mom knew how to geocache.

  Billie looks at her. Geo what?

  Rhiannon’s face finally cracks into a faint smile. Geocaching. It wasn’t really a thing yet six years ago. And there probably aren’t many boxes hidden in prisons.

  What boxes? What the fuck is geocaching?

  Hiding boxes at specific coordinates. Sometimes the boxes contain messages, little treasures. It’s a hobby. People find coordinates on websites and hunt around designated locations until they find boxes like these. They log their names in the boxes and put them back for other people to find.

  This isn’t for other people, Billie says. This one has our coordinates, our drawing.

  She probably just borrowed the idea. She made a k
ind of game for us.

  What for?

  Rhiannon sighs. Maybe so we’d forget we’re driving to her funeral.

  Billie sits up in the grass. So every coordinate has a box like this? All the way to Utah? And we have to figure out what the fuck it means at every stop?

  I don’t know. We can call Aunt Sue when we get to wherever we’re staying tonight. Rhiannon stands. But at least we found it. We found the box. And we should probably get back to the car and get on the road.

  Billie looks to the sky where the sun is just beginning to tilt toward the west. A ferruginous hawk soars above them, a bird of prey Billie knows from manuals and her training with Bud. A master falconer originally from Santo Domingo but trained in Nebraska where he grew accustomed to working with this species in their native range, his manuals filled with them despite Billie’s work with the red-tailed hawks of the lower Midwest. The bird circles above them and Billie stops herself from holding out her arm. No landing place. No glove. Rhiannon starts back on the loop that will return them to the visitor center, the small box in her hands, and Billie follows. When they reach the trailhead, Rhiannon grabs the hiking register and flips back through six months of names and nowhere among them is their mother. Billie watches Rhiannon’s gaze sweep the river valley before she takes the pen and signs their names on the day’s blank ledger.

  The date. The time. Proof that they were here.

  WHEN THEY REACH a BP station just past Brewster, a small town near the border of Colorado, Rhiannon refills the dwindling tank and Billie steps into the food mart’s cool air. The sun high, pushing toward late afternoon. I-70 the route they’ve continued following toward Colorado, Billie promising to map the next coordinates once they reach the state line. She leans her forehead against the cool glass of the mart’s refrigerators and regards the lighted rows of beer and soda and water. So much choice. The America she’s forgotten, a sprawl of endless highways, any variety of Pepsi she wants. She pulls out Rhiannon’s cell phone, a touch screen Rhiannon let her play with on the drive to Smoky Hill River until she learned how to use it. The last one she owned nothing but a flip phone, long disconnected but packed somewhere in her discharge bag with a contact list that still holds his name. She finds the internet browser on Rhiannon’s phone and then the white pages and then St. Louis, a name unique enough that she finds him swiftly: Oscar Doherty. McCausland Avenue. Age 35–40. Tim’s brother.

  Billie presses the number and dials before she loses her nerve.

  Oscar, it’s Billie, she says when he answers. Billie Hurst. Tim’s Billie.

  He breathes sharply across the line and she hates herself for identifying who she is like this. Tim’s Billie. As if he’d owned her.

  No collect call, Oscar says. I’m guessing you’re out?

  Look, I hate to call, she says. But you’re the only person I know who can help.

  Billie imagines him standing in his kitchen, the same kitchen of the same house where he made scrambled eggs and pancakes for her and Tim when they visited. So many weekends. Jacksonville so close to St. Louis. A familiarity that made her feel like he was her own brother and how quickly a familiarity vanished. Oscar single then and Billie wonders now if he has a partner, if he has a family.

  His voice is guarded, his once-easy tone stilted. What can I do for you?

  Billie tells him about her mother, about Utah. She tells him about the coordinates and where they are and what they found in Russell Springs and how they left something behind in St. Louis.

  I know it’s a big favor, she says. But you’re so close to Forest Park. I was wondering if you could just check.

  There is stillness on the other end of the line and Billie doesn’t want to imagine what Tim’s side of the story was. Whether Oscar ever knew the scope of his brother’s violence or if Tim only told them he didn’t know how crazy she would turn out to be.

  The Science Center, he finally says.

  The dinosaur park out back.

  I know it. Just give me the coordinates.

  Billie feels the tight coil of her stomach flood with relief. She glances around the food mart, the clerk behind the counter eyeing her as she paces the aisle of packaged chips. She dictates the exact coordinates to Oscar. Gives him Rhiannon’s number.

  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, she says. Just let me know what you find. We’ll be on the road for at least the next week.

  If I find something, you want me to hang on to it?

  I guess. Whatever it is, we can grab it on the way back to Champaign.

  Oscar pauses a moment. How are you doing?

  Billie doesn’t know if he means their mother or something else. I’m fine.

  I’m glad you’re out. Glad you’re doing okay.

  Billie can see Rhiannon through the food mart window recapping the gas tank and she feels the urge to hang up before the conversation leads to Tim.

  Thanks again, she says. Just give me a ring if you find anything.

  You gonna buy something? the clerk shouts and she pulls a package of Ruffles from the shelf and a Coke from the cooler. She takes the snacks to the cash register and glances out the window, Rhiannon already back behind the wheel.

  I called Tim’s brother, Billie says when she climbs inside the car.

  Rhiannon nods at the bag of Ruffles. We already have a million snacks.

  He said he’ll check for us. I gave him the coordinates.

  Rhiannon turns out of the gas station. How was it to talk to him?

  He didn’t say anything about Tim.

  Rhiannon doesn’t ask anything else. She pulls back onto the highway and finds the local public radio affiliate, what would be a rush-hour news update if they were anywhere near a city with traffic. Instead there is news of continued widespread rain across the Midwest, a tornado touching down last night in central Missouri. Then national news: indication from the Arizona flight’s recovered black box that the plane hit clear-air turbulence minutes before spiraling a sharp descent, the same exact finding of four of the past months’ crashes.

  I’m glad we’re driving, Rhiannon says.

  Have you ever even heard of clear-air turbulence?

  It’s a term they’ve been using the past few months. Something new. Some new kind of unexpected turbulence due to wind wakes and climate shifts.

  It’s windy as shit out here, Billie says. Though probably nothing to speeding around a track at two hundred miles per hour.

  Rhiannon says nothing and Billie imagines the lone television room in the Correctional Center where she and the other inmates gathered on hard couches to watch regulated programming. Family movies. Talk shows. Never sports events, what would have let her see her sister’s races. But sometimes local news that in the past months let Billie know something was changing in the atmosphere. Speculation from broadcasters of pilot error, the possibility of mechanical failure. If the planes were manufactured in the same facility. A problem of parts or labor. Something tangible to pinpoint, the question of climate change still a debate that left so many news anchors skeptical, a question Billie could have answered as she saw the sky shift across six years above the prison yard from bright-summer blue to mottled gray.

  I haven’t flown in months, Rhiannon says. Mom knew it, too, that I wouldn’t have wanted to fly.

  Billie looks at her. Where have you flown recently? I figured you’d always drive.

  Vacation, Rhiannon says quickly. Beth and I went to Punta Cana last year.

  You think you’ll call her?

  I don’t know. Probably just to check in. Let her know where we are.

  You think you’ll get back together?

  Billie, I don’t know. Things are so complicated right now. I’m just going to give it time. She glances over. Did you date anyone in prison?

  What, like other women?

  Anyone. Six years is a long time to be alone.

  After Tim, I wanted to be by myself for as long as I could.

  What do you mean?

  Bi
llie drinks her Coke and looks out the passenger-side window. Fields of sunflowers line the highway, lemon blankets catching the slanting sun. She remembers the first time Rhiannon told her in high school that she didn’t feel anything for her boyfriend, nothing like the lust they were supposed to feel as teenagers sneaking into cornfields because there was nowhere else to go. Robert. The goalie of the men’s varsity soccer team. He and Rhiannon dated all through high school and broke up right before graduation. Billie remembers Rhiannon telling her from a phone in Chicago that she was attracted to women, that she thought she might be in love with another girl in one of her few in-person communications classes. Billie still in high school, still running around with nameless boys across Champaign’s deserted back roads but old enough to know what this was, a hard confession, the words spit from her sister’s mouth like knocked-out kernels of broken teeth. How Rhiannon told her first, then their mother and at last their father. Billie thought of that phone call again and again from the closed-in walls of Decatur and from her chair in a circle of chairs at group therapy where the weight of the women’s stories around her made her feel too ashamed to speak. Women separated from their children. Women who’d gotten out only to get back in because no one would employ them. How she wanted to hear her own voice spill a secret about a split-open eye and a can of gasoline and how she only went to three group sessions before quitting and how she imagines telling her sister here in the Mustang shuttling across Kansas everything caught beneath her tongue. But Tim just wasn’t right for me is all she says and Rhiannon doesn’t press and for once Billie wishes she would. They pass a green highway sign of city distances. Forty-one miles to Burlington, Colorado.

  We’re nearing the state line, Rhiannon says. We should map the next coordinate.

  Billie pulls out the journal and the GPS. Opens the booklet to the next page beyond Russell Springs, a new coordinate etched beside a new sketch.

  What’s the drawing? Rhiannon asks.

  Billie looks at the arched back, the telltale plates. What she recognizes immediately from a childhood of living among her mother’s diagrams and photographs.

  A stegosaurus, she says.

  Where is it? Where are we headed?