Range of Light (12 page)

I stopped, exhausted, in a small clearing. “Water?” Unhooking the canteen from my woven black Camp Wildriver belt, I offered her a sip.

We drank water and gobbled trail mix. Then plodded into the clearing and up the last stretch of trail.

“Mono Pass. Elevation 10,604 feet.”
Near the base of the rusted sign was a gray metal box.

I lifted out the small, spiral pad listing the names of other people who had made it to the pass and read aloud the comments.

“Spectacular.”

“Stunning.”

“Saw two rattlers on the way up.”

Kath raised her eyebrows. “No way.”

Oh, that familiar sense of conviction. She had always believed truth to be some objective reality. Such a strong, clear relief from Mother and Sari when I was young, yet unnerving in her own way, for how could I achieve that unshakable confidence about what was real and what was simply imagined?

I continued reciting the entries.

“Tranquillity plus.”

“Magnificent.”

Words seemed too feeble to convey my response to this place. Although I admired these attempts at description, I just signed my name and the date, then I handed the pad to Kath.

“I always think of Amundsen when I come here.” She grinned. “Ridiculous, given how tame the walk is. Maybe the pad makes me think of his notebooks. Look, it's almost filled from this month. Sometimes when I see all these names, I marvel at the huge number of Republicans in California.”

“Come again?”

“I mean, how can you vote conservative after making that hike?”

I laughed.

“No, really. Sure, there are Republicans who don't get beyond their locked compound gates. But some of them do, and a place like this has to open up your mind, your heart. You know?”

“Oh, yes, yes.” I was still grinning.

Below, a small, calm lake invited us. I wanted to take a shortcut down to the water, however Kath warned that the black shale was slippery.

“I remember eating lunch here three years ago.” Kath was feeling expansive, walking with hands on her hips in a very Martha-like posture. “Finding the perfect spot by the lake, yet protected from the wind. I was munching happily and heard a rustle. A moment later there was another noise. Vole, I told myself. Marmot. The noise increased. Coyote? I started to lose confidence.”

Hard to focus on the tricky trail and Kath's story. Behind us something
was
prowling in the bushes. I preferred to hear this sort of tale once I was tucked in at night—perhaps via telephone in Massachusetts. Still, you had to catch Kath when she was feeling forthcoming. And this seemed to be her day.

“Beside me, I noticed fresh bear scat. I packed up. Then I heard a stirring from behind. When I turned, I expected to be pissed off at the loud, drunk guys in lederhosen I'd passed on the trail. Instead, I saw a hunched, dark figure disappear over the rim of the hill.”

I scanned Kath's face for a smile. But her jaw was set, serious, and her blue eyes were fixed in the past. The present creaking in the bushes could be wind. Or quail. On the other hand, Lou had warned me this was a prime year for bears.

“Let's move on a bit, before we stop for lunch,” I suggested nonchalantly.

“Sure. Down here, past this little lake, you can see Mono Pass on a clear day.”

Our day was no longer clear. The mutable mountain spirit had veiled the sun behind steely clouds and I'd begun to feel chilled. Not the place for a picnic.

“Last year,” she said, “I remember it was this beautiful turquoise pool. Last year. Someday that's all Mono Lake will be—a memory—if the L.A. water moguls get their way.”

“Yes.” I nodded, dredging up history lessons about bloated Southern Californians drinking the state dry.

“Sorry you can't see it,” Kath began, then interrupted herself. “Don't know why I'm apologizing. This is your state too. I mean, you were born here, you grew up here.”

“Everything is so impermanent.” I leaned on a rock, stretching my leg muscles. Kath didn't stretch before and after exercise. Did this stretching brand me as some kind of health club yuppie? “If we don't melt from the holes in the ozone layer, we could easily get tipped off by a random asteroid.”

“And if that doesn't happen, the sun is scheduled to burn out in a few million years.”

“Then what good will our music and theater and paintings and bibliographies be? The fact is, immortality will require a backup solar system.”

“So why survive?” she asked.

“Seriously?”

“Why struggle to live—particularly with integrity—when life isn't only uncertain, it's doomed? That's the ultimate choice: survival. And for what?”

“I waver about the meaning of faith,” I admitted. “Sanctuary of fools; power of heroes.”

Kath pulled a face. “Well, this is pretty heavy conversation on an empty stomach.” Gingerly, she picked her way over the shifting rocks to a giant granite slab. “Lunch on a boulder built for two?”

I made myself almost comfortable on the large rock, wistfully thinking back to our earnest talks in high school. I didn't realize how hungry I was until I began to eat. Somewhere down in that mist was the other side—the eastern flank of the Sierra, the end of California, the Nevada border, the beginning of the rest of the world. Noises returned: a mourning dove cooing. A chipmunk scratching up a tree. Cool wind mowed up the right side of the pass. In the distance, a thunderhead split loudly.

Before I could think better of it, I was saying, “I did miss you, you know.”

Kath nodded and took another bite, looking as if she were puzzling how to swerve this conversation to a better course.

“So I left”—I was leaning forward now—“but we stayed in touch for the first
two
years. I came home for Christmas. And that first summer, we wrote.”

Kath stared down toward Mono Lake.

“What the hell happened when I was in Edinburgh?” I paused, speaking to my half-eaten sandwich. “In our junior year?”

She was still staring through the haze at that damn, vanished lake.

“You not only stopped writing to me. You stopped everything. You dropped out of school.”

Kath clenched her teeth, to keep from screaming, perhaps, to keep from crying.

Mercilessly, I persisted. “You dropped off the face of the bloody earth!”

She turned away.

“Did it …” I paused, softening my voice as if trying to get Taylor to say what had really happened on the playground that day. “Did it have anything to do with Tom?”

Kath shrugged, raising her shoulders in a long breath to hold back the tears.

“No, not so much to do with Tom.” She spoke slowly. “Life just got very complicated.”

“Come off it, Katherine Peterson. Tell me. I feel as if I've been banging on a bolted door for twenty-three years.”

Tears. I pulled my arms around her alarmingly lean, tight body. Her shoulders shook with sobs. Eventually the story unfolded: pregnancy, months of uncertainty and panic, potions and procedures that almost killed her, an appalling time in the maternity ward, the impossible struggle to pay bills and stay in school. Finally dropping out. It all came tumbling forth in a voice colored by shame and anger, shaded with accusation.

“If I had known,” I tried, “if I'd only known …”

“So what if you
had
known?” Kath interrupted. “What could you have done from 6,ooo miles away?”

“I would have come home,” I answered simply, shocked Kath wouldn't have known that. I held her tighter to me.

She repeated my words numbly. “You would have come home?”

“Of course, you needed help.” Now
I
was angry. “What did you think— that I would have sent you a survey to fill out about emotional responses to pregnancy and abortion?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what I thought.”

My stomach clenched, angry at that past distance, fearful of this current intimacy, confined by the sweetish scent of Kath's overripe deodorant.

She continued to stare down toward invisible Mono Lake. “I don't know.”

Chapter Thirteen

Kath

Wednesday Afternoon / Saddlebag Lake

I DIDN'T WANT TO
go
to Saddlebag Lake with Adele that afternoon. I wanted to hike straight down to the Valley. Alone. Maybe drive back to Oakland by myself. But we'd agreed to revisit old haunts. Adele had looked forward particularly to Saddlebag Lake. Get on with it, I scolded myself.

A sign on the top of the small brown store read BOAT RENTALS, LUNCH COUNTER, TACKLE, GROCERIES. Firewood was on sale near the door. Inside the small shop was quiet, the swivel counter stools vacant. No one was sitting in the big wooden armchairs or poking around the shelf of used books.

Other people were too smart to risk getting stranded on a wet afternoon in this remote area. Adele perused the fishing gear section. I studied the shadowy clouds, impressed by how fast mountain weather could change. Looking around for a map of the area, I spotted a sign—WORLD MAPS: 25 CENTS. Unfolding one, I found a quaint 1950s Mercator projection of a former world.

Adele bought cherry bubble gum. Did she chew bubble gum at Wellesley? I liked the image of an urbane college professor jawing her way across campus between classes. The snack counter sold instant cocoa from those semidisgusting packets. If we made it back alive, I promised myself, I would order cocoa.

Rough wind chopped across the enormous lake, and the motorboat skipper looked about twelve. His clear blue eyes smiled beneath wisps of blond hair. Considering child labor laws, he might be sixteen. Still, no one would investigate at this altitude. Did he understand the danger of crossing a big lake in a thunderstorm? What could we do? Excuse ourselves and phone Washington? Climb in, I thought, eyeing the fragile vessel.

Our fair-haired captain handed us each a life preserver.

“A good sign.” Adele winked, donning hers immediately. Absently, she stroked the front of the iridescent orange vest with her long index finger.

The motor refused to start. A reprieve? I looked back at the store, lusting after fake chocolate. On the roof, tacked or stuck to the green trim, was a red foil wind sock in the shape of a heart. The glossy crimson kite pulsed against a bleak sky.

Once more the boy tried his accelerator. Eyes shut, Adele was breathing in the fresh mountain air.

According to my mini trail guide, Saddlebag Lake was large, scenic, great for fishing. But if a thunderstorm started, we should get off right away. Warily, I watched the gathering dark clouds. My father's brother Henrik was killed by lightning on the farm in Tjome. In a sudden downpour, he ran for cover, but too late. Henrik became an elaborate family legend: brilliant farmer, devastatingly handsome, the most charming of five brothers. One thing was certain—Henrik had been my father's closest friend, and his death was why Dad left Norway. As the legend was passed down, so was the fear. Irrational, I knew; after all, lightning rarely strikes twice in the same family, but I'd never been able to overcome my panic about storm-crossed lakes.

On the third attempt, our motor caught. It sounded like a consumptive cousin of Mrs. Castillo's lawn mower. Adele smiled faintly through thin, mauve lips.

Chugging across the water, I was terrified that we'd reunited after all these years simply to die together in a thunderstorm. I had had a premonition something dreadful would happen.

“My will, all my papers,
are in the top left-hand drawer of the desk.” I phoned Martha the morning I left.

“You go to the mountains every summer.” She was puzzled, annoyed. “And you never talk like this.”

“I'm trying to be responsible,” I said.

“Drama queen.” She'd laughed. And then, unable to suppress her concern, “Drive carefully.”

Of course I would drive carefully. I suffered from such chronic conscientiousness that I'd never intentionally endanger my life. Yet there were many times when I yearned for some natural force to take it from me, to grant reprieve from all this pressure and guilt and sadness.

Just now Baffin's death weighed heavily. I knew I should tell Adele about it, but I couldn't bear for her to find me sentimental. Better to stay silent awhile, to keep the memory safe. Be grateful Baffin isn't suffering, I told myself. I coveted death as much as I feared dying. Too much of a coward for suicide, I wanted to disappear suddenly, irrevocably. This lake could be the perfect exit.

At the end
of our
rather short and completely uneventful voyage, the boat bumped against a tire-padded dock. To display my courage, I let Adele disembark first. “See you at 5:30?” our captain inquired, his voice loud above the putt-putt-puttering­ engine and much too deep for a twelve-year-old.

“Sure.” I waved casually. “5:30.”

Cold. Breezy. The afternoon was a different country from this morning. Adele stretched her arms wide as she ran toward the trailhead.

Adele and I moved along the trail, separate in our thoughts. We'd survive the morning's intimacy. Adele had always had a maddening tendency to
find out.
I would never forget her questions about Martha's sudden wedding. Why was she getting married in dreary
January
?
No bridesmaids? Didn't I want to be a bridesmaid? Did my parents like Martha's boyfriend? How long had they known each other anyway? “Pregnant,” I said, finally, simply, and Adele's seventeen-year-old eyes turned sage. The Wards sent Martha an extra deep Corning Ware casserole dish.

Looking over my shoulder at somber Saddlebag Lake, I savored the dark side of the country's beauty. The cool, moist air was refreshing after this morning's hot, dusty hike. After Monday's arid drive from the airport I could feel my muscles relax in a sweet, welcoming way. I enjoyed hiking in damp weather—maybe from some primal Nordic Bog thing. The trail was easy, not nearly as breathtaking as our route to Mono Pass.

A coyote startled us. Standing in the path. Owning the ground. Warning intruders with her stillness.

“Ooooh.” Adele caught her breath.

“What's she doing out in the middle of the day?” I demanded in alarm. A bad sign. For her. For us.

The bedraggled, blond animal looked pathetic, a middle-aged woman suffering from peroxide overdose.

“Molting,” I observed, thinking how weird it would be to watch winter wools disintegrate from your body and find cottons emerging from beneath. Embarrassing. That's how the animal looked. Abased. Momentarily, she returned our gaze, defying contempt. In her own time, she stepped into the brush. Then disappeared. Gone. Like Baffin. Gone.

Both of us held back a second in silence and in respect.

I moved first. I knew Adele liked to walk in front, but if we didn't set a brisker pace, we'd never complete the loop before our boat returned. My lungs filled with fresh air. How good to stretch and move at my own speed. I kept an ear cocked for Adele, to gauge her progress on the path.

That summer after high school, Adele and I walked here in the lead, Paula and Donna between, Nancy in the rear. “Caboose,” we named Nancy when she hiked with us, when she wasn't back at the tent, reading her magazines. She remained so much more vivid in my mind than Paula or Donna. Nancy was an expansive person—in her gestures and volume and appetites. In some ways, she held a mirror up to the group—one of those three-sided department store mirrors—capturing angles from each of us. I could see my own uncertainty in Nancy, and I envied the way she flaunted her ingenuousness, like a kitschy rhinestone necklace. She wouldn't let you forget her. Years after I tried to disappear, Nancy continued to send Christmas cards filled with news of her expanding family and details about Paula and Adele and rumors about Donna. Even Adele gave up, but Nancy continued to write, and my dutiful parents always forwarded the cards. Bless her intrusive little heart. I hoped Nancy was recovering now. Maybe she was propped up against a pink satin pillow, mending from surgery and getting a pedicure from one of her daughters.

Adele was talking, suddenly, as if meditating aloud. I missed the first part.

“ … We don't do enough hiking in Maine. We might as well be in Cambridge for all our exposure to nature. So we
do
walk down to the cove every day. In truth, though, our cabin is just a slightly uncomfortable house with a nice view and no TV, a place where we pretend to get away from it all, but where really we just get together with each other.”

“That's OK, isn't it?” I asked, not knowing where she was going with this, yet understanding she needed to talk.

“Oh, I love Lou and the boys. I'm grateful for them after growing up in my own crazy home, but sometimes I worry that I love the idea of a harmonious family more than I love these particular, well-behaved people.”

What was I going to say to that? Unlike Adele, I wasn't interested in getting to the bottom of things. The bottom of things was inevitably mucky and often dangerous. I checked my watch. I could see the hut from here. We were making decent time. We'd be back to the dock at least fifteen minutes early. Adele didn't seem to want a response, returning to silent musing. Sunlight shifted in and out of clouds, shadowing, then brightening, the trail.

When we were young,
visiting
Adele's house was like entering a movie set. Everything was new and polished and poised to be appreciated. The unusable translucent china in the antique cabinet. The unwalk-on-able Persian carpet in front of the bricked-up fireplace. Even their dog was stronger on appearance than authenticity: an Afghan named Max, who betrayed his pedigree by stealing milk cartons and impregnating neighbor dogs. I never understood why Dr. and Mrs. Ward tolerated Max's libido. I couldn't fathom the Wards at all. It wasn't until Mrs. Ward's third or fourth trip to Providence Hospital that Adele explained how her mother “suffered from depression.” She was as ashamed of the pill popping as I was amazed by it. Imagine taking pills to shut out life. Well, I was young. The pills explained the tight smile on Mrs. Ward's impeccably made-up face. Mrs. Ward, who was always sheathed in the latest merino outfit—I knew from my job at Roos Atkins how expensive these weaves were—who looked like a top-of-the-line mannequin, was a kind of drug addict. How sad. How hard on Adele. My father thought it was extravagant when the Wards took their trip to Europe in 1963. But I didn't judge them. I knew Mrs. Ward needed some serious cheering up. So did her daughters.

Plink, plink.
Reverie disturbed,
I
noticed measles on my faded blue sleeves. Adele must be appalled by my wardrobe—the same work shirts and jeans I wore in college. Meanwhile, she'd been sporting a different outfit each day of our trip. These wet splotches took a few seconds to register. By then my face was soaked. Adele was calling behind me, “Kath,” and pointing to the hut.

“Right,” I shouted back into the sudden wind.
Sheets
of rain poured between us.

Standing in the doorway, I watched Adele plugging up the hill. She was in decent shape, moving with speed, grace, and hardly any evident exertion, enjoying herself. I grinned when my old friend rushed through the doorframe.

Adele moved too far into the hut—to a place where the roof was memory—and now she felt the soaking rain she hadn't noticed on her high-speed race to the shelter.

“Oh, my.” She gulped, plopping beside me on the bench and panting for breath. Gradually she took in the windowsill, the remains of the fireplace.

“What do you imagine?” she asked. “Two men? Tins of beans and fish from Saddlebag Lake and an occasional rabbit? Would they've eaten squirrels and marmots? Did something eat them?” She scooted closer to me.

“We seem to be doing a tour of miners' huts.” I shrugged selfconsciously. I hated when I chatted mindlessly to cover my nervousness; still my thin voice persevered. “First Gaylor Lakes and now this.”

Lightning splashed. Too close. The frame of the ancient hut shivered and our room was filled with light, as if Nancy'd arrived with her flash camera to take a last photo of Adele and me. My heart raced. Ridiculous to be afraid of a little thunder and lightning, I told myself. Still, the silver aureole shimmered around us, threatening, haunting, caressing.

“That was kind of scary.” Adele wiggled tension from her shoulders.

“Yeah, I guess,” I answered, ever forthcoming.

She changed the topic. “Do you think they were mining for silver here, too?” This really mattered to her.

“Think so.” I admired the delicacy of Adele's face as her dark hair straggled wet around shiny cheekbones. Usually that voluminous mane distracted from everything in her face except the eyes.

Her teeth chattered.

“Here.” I produced my yellow poncho. “Use this to dry your hair a bit.”

“But it'll get all wet.”

“It's a poncho.” I laughed, strangely giddy. “Waterproof.”

Adele grinned, accepting the offer.

Her wide, toothy smile brought two dimples to each cheek and slanted those deep brown eyes in an almost Asian way. Adele was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known.

“I wonder how the Indians and miners got along.” She sat straighter, looking around uneasily.

I leaned back. “The government removed the Indians by the time the miners arrived.”

“Something strange about this place.” She frowned.

Adele's discomfort was contagious. I stood, stretched, then walked to the windowsill, watching clumps of gray cloud chase each other across the sky. Rain beat down on the trail outside. The world smelled damp and fecund. I recognized a small, happy feeling, a remotely familiar mix of well-being and excitement.

Adele was shivering.

I wandered back to the bench. “Imagine the isolation, the self-sufficiency of the miners. I mean, I don't have much sympathy for their prospecting, but it must've been a tough life.”

“No, think of the adventure.” She smiled.