Range of Light (7 page)

“Stupid, that's what I think sometimes too. I spend my whole life writing books about ideas.”

I waited.

“Eight years writing one book. Ten years writing the next two”—she flung her left arm wide, northward—“and now three years compiling a bibliography that will be read by—what?—ten people, twelve if I'm lucky.”

I inched over to her. Hands on my old friend's neck, I began to massage. Reaching under the heavy green sweater collar—how could she stand this hot wool?—I kneaded her knotted muscles. “At least thirteen,” I whispered.

Adele laughed. God, that wonderful, long, low, gurgling laugh from so many years ago. I could feel her shoulders lower and release. Still, I kept my hands there.

Adele relaxed in the fresh, early afternoon air, and the vibrations from her back felt like purring. I tried to ignore my sadness about Baffin.

“Remember how we used to gossip at the lockers?” Adele asked softly, like she was talking to herself. “Remember how we talked on the phone every night? How we were going to be friends throughout our adventurous lives?”

“Yes,” I answered, longing and fear pulling me toward her, away again.

“Maybe we always
have
been friends, despite the distance and the differences. A conversation on hold. Or do you think that's sheer sentimentality?”

I was afraid it might be. But I didn't have to answer.

Adele was crying in quick, jagged sobs. Terrified, I lifted my hands from her neck into the dry mountain air. The only comfort I was capable of offering was the canteen. I heard myself say something as foolish as “Wet your whistle?”

We were walking
southwest now
at a more even pace, Adele's energy returning. Silently. More comfortably than this morning or last night. Each less aware of the other person. Finally able to accept the land as a companion.

I enjoyed the long, downhill strides you could take toward Lower Gaylor Lake. What a perfect place to camp, but the grassy meadow was so fragile and the supply of wood minuscule. I'd love to sneak in here on my own some night. I'd be careful. No one would know except that old marmot up at the cabin. I wondered sometimes about my fantasies of being alone. I had always had them. As a child, before I fell asleep at night, I often imagined myself in a turn-of-the-century Pullman coach. I was surrounded by burnt purple velvet, watching out the window for the moon. Lulled to a peaceful sleep by the rocking of the train going somewhere, anywhere, away.

The sky shone a bright blue, completely deserted by morning clouds. Stripping as we walked, I shed down to my last T-shirt. When I glanced back at Adele, she had tied the sweater and parka around her waist. Tomorrow, she'd have a better idea of what to wear.

“You've come closer to achieving your vision,” Adele mused.

It took a minute to realize she was continuing our lunch conversation. “Oh, sure,” I answered, “driving an ambulance through war-torn Europe?”

“No, I mean …” She pulled out a pack of sugarless gum and offered me a stick.

“No thanks.”

“Mouth's dry,” she explained. “My boys taught me this. On our hikes in Maine.”

“Do you guys get up there a lot?” That's it, I said to myself, talk about her family. A natural topic between two women. Would she think Anita was a natural topic? No, Kath, keep it predictable.

“Not enough.” Adele sighed. “Two weeks in the summer. Thanksgiving. Maybe Easter. It's really a sin, when you think about it, that the house goes empty most of the year.” She stuffed the pack into her jeans' pocket and grinned at me. “No you don't! You can't shift the topic that easily. We were talking about you.”

“Hmmmmmm.”

“See, you always wanted to do something to help, to change the world.”

“Right in the center of revolution, I am.”

“That's right,” Adele said seriously.

“Laying in sandbags against the end of the world.”

“But at least you're
in
the world—working with kids around AIDS, pregnancy, drugs, literacy. It's completely consistent with what you always wanted to do. You may not be careening around in an ambulance, but it's important work.”

Was important work. I couldn't bring myself to talk about the layoff. I felt ashamed, as if I'd dropped out of school once again. Of course the funding cuts had been political, not my fault at all. I'd done some decent work. Look at Luna almost finished at Laney, and Betty, who was now a dental hygienist. The program
had
made small differences in some lives. OK, I had to talk about being unemployed sooner or later. The longer I postponed it, the harder it would be to tell Adele. But not yet.

I concentrated on Lower Gaylor Lake, where I would remove my boots and hiking socks and undersocks and settle my feet in the cool, cool waters. I wanted to leave problems about family and lovers and job and school behind. We were getting close to the lake now. Two California gulls circled. Was that a spotted sandpiper along the shoreline?

Chapter Eight

Adele

Tuesday Evening / Lyell Fork

FISH LEAPED IN THE
stream
,
casting circles on the mottled water. My tired ankles waded in shimmering, sweet-smelling grass. As sun edged toward the horizon, our shadows lengthened across the boulders and Kath's baseball hat gave her silhouette a rakish quality.

“I remember the sunsets here,” I whispered, manically chewing gum to clear my breath, “also those clouds—so wild and fiery—what were they called?”

“Cumulonimbus.”

I smiled at the rhythm of vowels, at our companionable memories. To the west, sun splashed flames on Mount Dana. The pink eastern sky washed down to the hills, the grass, the creek. Water whistled past us, streaked with blue and coral. Once I planned to write my dissertation on the Luminists who came to paint the Sierra. And, although Frederic Church's work was the most famous, I preferred the paintings of John Muir's friend, William Keith. This place had a powerful hold on Scots. Perhaps it was the Ward in my blood that drew me here.

“There,” Kath said suddenly, pointing to a large gray rock twenty yards from the trail. “Let's sit.”

After sunset Mount Dana and Mount Gibbs seemed even more imposing in the rosy sky. A sliver of moon was rising over Kuna Crest, whispering into the shoulder of the mountain as it ascended.

“OK.” I followed warily, for although I coveted this moment of twilight, I knew that it couldn't last. I had spent half my life trying to make permanent what was not and perhaps the other half trying to make the inextricable relationships, such as those with my family, simply transitory ones.

Kath's voice woke me. We sat close enough to feel each other's warmth in the cool night. “We could float from here to the ocean.”

Yes, I thought, and around the world. “Oh, right”—I caught on—“this is the beginning of the Tuolumne River. Now where does it go from here?”

Her face lit up. Although we both cherished this place, her connection was deeper. I felt a little jealous of her passion for the High Country.

“Well, water comes from Mount Lyell and Mount Dana, threads through the meadows, navigates downhill to Waterwheel Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne and ends in O'Shaughnessy Dam.” Her face took on that intense earnestness I remembered from high school.

I nodded attentively, affectionately.

“From there it's stored in San Pedro Reservoir to irrigate the Central Valley. The rest mixes with the San Joaquin and flows out into San Francisco Bay.”

“Which is why we have desert on one side of the Sierra and farmland on the other.” I nodded, imitating the lispy voice of our unfairly maligned sophomore science teacher, Mr. Cummings. “Human engineering.”

We laughed.

“Sometimes when I'm hiking alone,” Kath mused, “I wonder if I'm more afraid of people or bears.”

The first time I stayed
overnight
at Kath's we were eleven. By the sixth grade, I had visited a lot of my friends' houses, but Kath's place was distinctive, exotically decorated with her mother's ornate Quebec crucifixes and turquoise statues of the Virgin Mary. Kath told me her father drew the line at Catholic school. Enough that they should go to church, he had protested to Mrs. Peterson, but he wasn't going to have his daughters study a peasant language like Latin. Everything was different about the Peterson place—the random, lumpy furniture, the always-running TV. There were no paintings, no bookcases. The living room walls were hung with metal-framed family portraits and a church calendar. Everyone sat in front of the TV—Mr. Peterson whittling. My mother would have imploded at the sight of those tiny balsa chips on the carpet. But Mrs. Peterson just got out the vacuum at the end of the night and, presto, the mess disappeared. Dinner was starchy and ample, and there was a big bowl of buttered popcorn on the coffee table with a giant bottle of Pepsi from which we filled our green plastic glasses. My memory of that first sleepover was almost as vivid as the recollection of my mother picking me up the next morning. She seemed to sniff the doorway as she formally thanked Mrs. Peterson. In the car, she asked me, “What does Mr. Peterson
do
?”

Another childhood scene: the following year
chez moi.
We sat on my bed, giggling, pretending to do a jigsaw puzzle. Mother, now resigned to Kath, served us corn bread and apple juice. As soon as Mother left, we continued confiding about sanitary napkins and belts and those tampons some of the wild girls were using. Kath exhibited stoic courage about her cramps. I listened with envy and embarrassment, impatient for my first period. Examining my girlish room—daintily decorated with pale pink walls and rose trim, lace bureau scarf and pillowcases, Princess telephone, vanity lined with dolls of six nationalities—I ached to be the woman Kath had become.

Lyell Fork was disappearing
around
us into a vague territory of shadows and noises. Now the nocturnal animals would take over from us creatures of the sun. I imagined the night world to be gentler than the harsh daylight land, as if seeing in the dark were a sign of holiness. Wordlessly we turned back toward camp. Perhaps night was a preparation for death, an instruction in humility and surrender. Soon primitive evensong would commence. An urge rose from within me—a noise, an old, obstinate question.

“I wish we had stayed in closer touch.” I said “we,” accepting some responsibility.

“Yeah.” Kath quickened her pace.

I followed her gaze to the stream. One, two, three fish. Jumping, darting in aquatic ballet.

Selfish to disturb her reverie. I felt as if I had barged into church belting out “Only the Lonely.” However some instinct, some perversity, pressed me forward. “I've been so comfortable with you these last two days. I mean, it's like when we were in school. It's just that … I don't know … it would have been wonderful to share more of each other's lives.”

I paused, conscious of Kath's jaw setting, her gaze shifting to middle distance. I shouldn't have blundered into this, I should have planned it carefully. After all, my disappointment and grief had been welling up for two decades. Kath might have equally strong feelings. As much as I feared her emotions, I desperately needed her to care. This familiar spot seemed to invite intimacy, as if we had returned to our private sanctuary. No, of course, many people had watched this evening waterway before—Indian grandmothers, European sheepherders, Transcendental hermits. Our friendship had always taken place on some well-beaten path, and it was ludicrous of me to fetishize either the relationship or the place as private refuge.

I watched her posture stiffen.

“You,” she began softly, too softly.

I leaned closer.

“You're the one who broke off.” She walked faster.

“But”—I hurried to catch up—“I wrote you from Scotland every—”

“I'm not talking about Scotland—”

“Every week for three months.” I insisted on finishing the ancient complaint. “I phoned, left messages, four or five times.”

“You left long before that. You went to Radcliffe. You never intended to live your life in California.”

“I went away to a good college, a perfectly normal American choice.” We were walking even faster now—whether to get back to camp before it was pitch black or to escape the intensity of this conversation, I couldn't tell.

Kath held herself in, peering through dimness at the elusive trail.

“I came home on breaks.”

“You didn't after the first two years.” She walked faster. “You started a whole new life.”

“I just went away to school,” I repeated, flabbergasted.

Deliberately, she continued, “You know, this is a funny country. You grow up with someone, go to school together, hang out, assume you have the same options. Then a few years later they come back with a Ph.D., a BMW and a new accent. And you're still looking for a steady job.”

“I intended to come back. Remember how we were going to be neighbors and baby-sit for each other?” Despite the anxiety in my gut, I had to smile at our precisely timed life blueprint. Nowadays there seemed to be
no
time left because I had lost the youthful sense that there was a time for
everything.
I felt Sari's death now, as I always felt it in California. Why had I thought I'd be able to avoid it this time? Because Kath was with me, because we could rewrite the whole scene together, resurrect her from the dead? All these years later it was hard to admit that I couldn't have stopped her. It was
Sari's
death, Sari's suicide, Sari's exit from the family. Perhaps I could even feel grateful for her that she had found a way out.

“I left my family.” I stopped, struggling to hold Kath in my gaze. “I didn't leave California. I didn't leave you.”

“Leaving is an action.” Kath's eyes grew wide. “It's not an idea. You can't pick your audience.”

I concentrated on not crying. If I abandoned anyone it had been Sari.

“Look, Del, I'm really, really sorry about what happened to your sister. It was tragic.” She walked faster now, speaking into the wind, and it was difficult to hear. “I liked Sari a lot. It was a terrible waste. And so hard on you!”

I stared at her expectantly. The wrong note, for Kath did not like demands. “Yes,” I said simply, concealing the degree of my wanting before it was too late.

She looked behind her at the trail and continued. “Still, long before her death, you were gone for good. Once you went to your Ivy League college, you were on your way up and out.”

I could see Kath trying to hold herself back, but the banks had crumbled. “You made your choice.”

Her words were a fist in my stomach.

“Don't you understand? Don't you see, I was leaving home. I wasn't leaving
you
.”

“Home.” Kath glanced out at the stream as we walked over the bridge. “Wasn't I part of home to you? A close friendship—‘a best friendship'—and you walked away.”

“Kath, be reasonable.”

“I guess friends aren't that important. People have lifetime attachments to their parents, spouses, kids. But friends are expendable.”

“For Christ's sake,” I shouted into the mountains that now seemed to surround us like shadowy judges, “I just went to college.”

She persisted with infuriating calm. “You just went to find yourself a new life.”

She was right,
of course,
although I still pretended not to understand. I
had
left Kath. And I had left the West. I was a deserter in the undeclared civil war. Lou thought Western identity was a joke, but to Kath and me California was nourishment and refreshment. I had never been sympathetic to patriotism, but I had always felt remorse about leaving the West. Remorse when Canadians complained about their friends defecting to the United States, when the Scots talked about the brain drain to England. In Boston, I inveighed against the provincialism of Easterners, but Kath was right, I had become one of them. Tonight I was too tired, too angry, too petty to tell her I understood this, that I was sorry, that I didn't know what else I could have done. Instead, I declared, “Well, how about
your
disappearing act?”

A jay barked loudly from the stand of lodgepole pines. Those Steller's jays were notorious camp robbers, but I loved their sauciness all the same, and I concentrated on the birds' shrieking.

Kath produced a flashlight. “It's stupid to stay out this late,” she grumbled. “I should have been watching.”