“WE CAN’T GO AROUND?” Day asked the next morning. They’d been hiking for three hours. Despite being fortified with cowboy coffee in bed—compliments of Club Maze—and despite Nick’s pile sweater padding her hips under her pack, Day was unprepared to scale the sandstone wall before them.
“It’s twenty miles around the hairpin,” Nick said. During the planning meeting, he and Grace and Zac had agreed that they would cross up and over the tongue of land. Now he realized Day hadn’t been paying attention. “Anyhow, you’re going to have to climb to get out of the Maze, Day. But this is just a walk up. We almost don’t need a rope.”
Day scanned the wall. He was right. If she weren’t wearing a pack, it would be easy. But her pack weighed half her own weight.
“I’ll lead,” said Nick, “and set up a belay.”
As he started sorting out the ropes, preparing for the ascent, Day zipped up her jacket. She listened to him consult with Zac, who was to belay him from the bottom once Nick placed protection. Then he turned to her. Including the others, he said, “Let’s clarify communication.”
There were new phrases to learn. “On belay,” “Climbing,” “Rock,” “Up rope,” “Slack,” “Falling!” Day thought she could remember the last one. Nick showed her how to tie into her harness. “Three components of your safety system can’t be backed up. Harness, rope and tie-in knot.” He showed her how to tie the rope through all the layers of webbing on her harness with a figure-eight follow-through knot. Grace and Zachary, who both had experience climbing, watched anyhow as Nick made her practice the knot three times, testing her as he had in Marble. “And when you’re off the rope, you say…?”
“Belay off.”
He checked the sky for clouds. In the southwest, weather came in fast. But from where they stood, he couldn’t see beyond the high canyon walls.
“Okay, I’m going up.”
When he was at the top, had set up an anchor and thrown down the rope, Grace suggested, “Day, why don’t you go next?”
Day put on the climbing harness, tied in as Nick had shown her, approached the wall and tugged on the rope.
He called, “On belay!”
The rope was slack, so she yelled, “Up rope!” and Nick pulled it up.
“Climbing!”
“Climb.”
She started up. It was not almost a walk up, as he had said, but there were plenty of ledges and handholds. Nick kept perfect tension on the rope from the top. When Day was two-thirds of the way up, it became trickier. A sheer stretch of rock ten feet high lay in front of her. From the bottom, Zac coached, “Go to your left.”
Fatigued, unused to climbing, let alone with a pack, Day scanned the face until she saw where he meant. There was a foothold, but above it, nothing. She moved over to the right and placed the sole of her boot onto a tiny shelf, but when she put her weight on it, her toe slipped out.
She heard Nick above her. “What’s up?”
“She’s at the crux,” said Zac. “Try the left, Day. What you’re doing is harder.”
Stay calm, Day. Don’t feel pressured. You can do this. “But there’s nothing above there.”
“There’s a handhold on your right.”
Day put the toe of her boot in the foothold and pulled herself up, wobbling under the burden of her pack. Nick drew up the slack.
“Reach up with your right hand,” called Grace.
Shaking, she put her bare fingertips up to the right.
“You’re almost there,” Zac said. “It’s a ledge.”
She found the ledge. I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough.
“There’s a little crack on the right, under your handhold,” encouraged Zachary. “Put the toe of your boot in there.”
She did as he said, but it wouldn’t hold. Her leg muscles vibrated madly, and her left boot began slipping from its purchase. “Falling!”
The rope caught her, and she landed clumsily on the ledge where she had stood before.
Try again. Don’t panic. She wondered what Nick was thinking. Was he wishing he was with Shep, who had climbed El Capitan? Don’t think about it. You’re not Shep. She tried the same foothold, the same handhold.
“Falling!” Her knee scraped the rock.
Up top, Nick spotted storm clouds approaching from the southwest. It was noon, late to be doing something like this. On this spit of land, they would be magnets for lightning. But going around would cost them a day, leave them short on food and water. “Zac. Tell her to untie and wait on that ledge. You and Grace come up, and I’ll go down and help her.”
Grace, then Zachary, climbed up, and both easily passed the crux while Day watched, feeling hopeless. Within ten minutes Nick stood beside Day on the ledge. “Take off your pack. I’ll carry it up for you.”
Day acceded with regret. She wasn’t doing it all herself if she couldn’t carry her own pack. Grace had made it up that stupid crux. But she leaned against the wall, bracing herself, unfastened her hip and sternum straps, and removed her pack.
Nick retied the rope to her harness. The shadows of the afternoon had faded to light gray. “Feeling a little shaky?”
“Yes.”
“You can do this, Day.”
He had hoped that Grace would find a route Day could use, too. Sometimes women were subject to different limitations than men. But Grace had gone the same way he had.
Day lacked the upper-body strength and the climbing experience.
Nick considered the wall, looking for possibilities. “Come over here. Left foot here.”
“It won’t hold.”
“Don’t say that till you try it.”
She already had. But she tried—and fell on the tense rope.
“Try again, and use this handhold.” Nick supported her as she started to climb.
“Up rope!”
The rope went up.
“Day, reach over to your right. It’s a long stretch with your right leg.”
She tried it and felt herself slipping. As she attempted to pull her leg back, she suddenly flipped around so that her back was against the wall. “Falling!” Her elbows scraped the sandstone.
Nick saw the blood.
“Day, look at me.”
She did, her chin trembling.
“Day, this is a hard backpacking trip, and you’re doing great. You can go up this wall. You can go the way you just started to go. Just trust yourself.”
“I’m not strong enough. My arms won’t pull me up.”
“I know. But it’ll work. You can make it work. It’s just this little wall, and then it’s a walk to the top. You can see it from here. You can see the way to go.” If she didn’t make it this time, they’d pull her up. The storm was coming.
Day glanced at the sky nervously, and he knew she was thinking about the weather, too. She knew the dangers. Sandstone that became slickrock when wet. Lightning.
She faced the wall again. I have to go up.
She tried the foothold he had suggested, then the handhold. Then that second elusive foothold. His hands spotted her, but it was the memory of his words that emboldened her. For just a moment she knew that her three holds were in perfect balance.
“You’ve got to trust your right foothold. See that big stair-step?”
She understood. She forced herself to trust her weight to the ledge, then lifted her left foot. When her right boot started to slip, she held the wall with her knee while she dragged her left foot to its new purchase. Then she fell. “Falling!” she cried, twisting and banging along the wall.
Nick steadied her as she landed on the ledge. “Don’t use your knees.”
She gasped for breath, quaking from tension.
“Okay? Look, we’ve got to outrun this storm, so—”
What he was going to suggest was something she couldn’t face. Failure. A weakling. “I’m going up. I’ll get it this time.” She turned to the wall again, and as her right foot reached for the skinny toehold, she felt herself starting to cry. Dammit, you stupid rock. I’m going up.
Watching, Nick bit his lip hard. He’d never seen anyone so determined.
She held on tenaciously with her right hand and put her left boot in the new foothold. As she hauled herself up, she almost fell again, but she regained her balance, grabbing clumsily at the wall. Then the hard part was over, and as Nick had said, it was a walk to the top.
Nick came up two minutes later, carrying her pack. The memory of her tears burned in his mind, disquieting him. Months ago she’d asked him if it would make a difference if she could follow him the places he wanted to go. Say that effort wasn’t for me, Day, but for you.
He wondered if it might be for both of them, if Day had needed to come for her own reasons—and needed something stronger than personal challenge to bring her here.
She had already taken off her harness, and the four of them worked together, coiling the rope and stowing the gear, then putting on their packs as the first raindrops fell. Far across the white rim thunder rumbled, and jagged lines of white split the dark sky.
Time to move. “Let’s go.” Nick had taken this route through the Maze before, and he remembered the trail down. It was a scramble, but Zac and Grace would have no problem. As he took the lead, avoiding the slickrock that was already becoming dangerously slippery with rain, he planned their route.
At the top of the trail he told Zac, “Go ahead.”
Grace followed, then Day.
A less-experienced hiker, she descended more slowly than the others. Zachary. and Grace were cross-country runners, and Nick saw them waiting for him and Day. “Go on to the bottom.” He’d hang behind with Day.
The trail was loose sandy soil, crusty dried mud, and rocks. As she rushed in the rain, Day’s feet slid out from under her. She slammed backward on her pack.
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
From behind, Nick lifted her pack so that she could stand.
“Thanks.”
The trail grew steeper, then edged along wet sandstone, a long stretch of slickrock leading past an alcove containing an Anasazi grainery. Zac and Grace had only glanced at the ruin before going past. The floor of the canyon was a better place than an alcove to wait out an electrical storm.
Day stepped tentatively on the slickrock. How could she cross it? It was more slippery than algae on a stream boulder. The air smelled like ozone. She put her weight on her boot, and Nick grabbed her hand.
“There’s sand in that trough there. Walk on it.”
She did, and it was easier, but through the wet hair plastered to her face she discerned that beyond the alcove was only more slickrock, with a fifty-foot drop below. She edged toward the overhang, balancing in the crease between two swellings of Entrada sandstone.
Through the rain came a bright flash of light, then almost immediately a shattering bang of thunder. Water coursed down the slickrock.
“Come on, babe. Keep going. We’re almost there. We’ll wait it out at the grainery.” And pray the lightning didn’t decide to take a shortcut through their bodies to the ground.
The sandstone glowed blue with St. Elmo’s fire. The tiptoe patter of desert rain punctuated the silence before the next searing light, before the boom that made Day jump. But she had reached the alcove, and she ran inside.
“Back, to the wall,” said Nick. “Take off your pack and sit on it, and keep your hands and feet off the ground.” The alcove was about ten feet deep and twenty feet wide. At the farthest side was the ruin of a round grainery of mud-anddab construction. The door was oval. Water poured from overhangs across the canyon, and Nick heard the water all around before the light blazed again outside. He relaxed. The Anasazi were good at building where they wouldn’t be hit by lightning.
Anasazi…Pots.
Feeling like the thief he was, he removed his own pack and sat on it a few feet from Day. She was staring out at the canyon and the storm, her face white. He knew she felt she was slowing everyone down, holding them back. He’d seen her tears and her courage, and they had brought his own feelings to the surface, as though the thin shell over them could be scraped off if he even bumped into someone else. She’d been so brave.
The secrets he was keeping from her felt like cowardice.
She would hate him if she knew.
He hated himself.
Tell her. Be as brave as she is.
No!
He jumped at the next flash, the next sound.
Day asked, “Do you think Zac and Grace made it down?”
She was worrying that she’d put them all in danger, Nick reflected. “I’m sure they did.” The thunder and lightning were still close, and they should wait for the rock to dry before walking. “Let’s hear some more of that story.”
“All right.” Day remembered where she’d left the Knight of the Cart. “Well, the knight had a dilemma. The knight whom he’d defeated had asked for mercy, yet the damsel who had just arrived urgently beseeched the victor to grant her his head.”
Nick winced when the Knight of the Cart did cut off his opponent’s head and gave it to the damsel. But the story soon took a turn. In a joust, the hero won the freedom of the queen. The Knight of the Cart was revealed to be Lancelot, but when he was granted an audience with Guinevere, the queen would not speak to him.
“Why not?”
“She didn’t say, and Lancelot could do nothing but grant his lady her wish and withdraw. Very depressed, he went off to find his companion Gawain, from whom he had been separated.”
The storm had stopped and a filtered sun was warming the rocks.
Finished with her installment of the story, Day stood up to inspect the grainery. She gave a small cry. Barely visible from beneath the sand in the ruin was the rippled gray side of an Anasazi pot. Just as someone had left it centuries before. “Nick! There’s a pot here. Come look. I’ve never seen a pot anywhere but in a museum.”
He went to the grainery to see the piece. Dolores corrugated style. Day would have been interested to know. He didn’t tell her. Crouching beside her, he eyed the section exposed in the sand and didn’t suggest uncovering it. The right thing was to leave everything untouched.
Nick had never done that in his life.
He felt vulnerable and longed to throw himself at Day’s feet and confess. But he could only crouch beside her, feeling her goodness, knowing that any decency growing inside him was because of her. Wanting to be as fine as he could be for love of her.
THEY CAMPED in the canyon below the alcove, about two hundred yards from a pour-off that had worn a pool in the curving sandstone. As soon as he’d helped Day pitch the tent, Nick disappeared, and he was gone so long that at last she searched for him.
Weaving through the cottonwoods on the canyon floor, she found him working in the sand beside the pool with Zachary. It looked like they were building something, but they were also skipping stones in the pool, doing pull-ups on the overhanging rock ledges, having fun.
She left without disturbing them.
When she and Grace had made dinner, cheese biscuits and curried rice with nuts and dried fruit, she went to get the men. They were just wading out of the brush near the pool.
Zachary said, “We built a sauna.”
Slapping at mosquitoes as she peered through the brush, Day spied a black tarp spread over some kind of dome.
Nick rubbed his hands in anticipation and winked at her. “Club Maze.” As Zac returned to camp ahead of them, Nick explained, “The sauna’s kind of small. We made a frame out of branches. I thought you and I could let Zac and Grace use it first.”
A backpacking sauna. A vision of warm transparent water, a white beach and a clean hotel room with a wet bar filled Day’s mind—Club Med, not Club Maze. But she appreciated what Nick had done. “Thanks.”
Day’s conflicting emotions confused her. Her father used to build saunas by the river for her and Grace. Day remembered playing with her sister in the silt at the shore of the Colorado, swimming in her life vest while he kept a careful eye on them. The memory was earthy and distant.
What had happened to that part of her?
In her mind she saw a man emerging from white foam, screaming, then pushed under by the force of the torrent. His glasses were twisted sideways on his head, dislodged but not coming off because of the cotton keeper strap. It was stretched tight, making a diagonal line across his cheek. Jim Antonio.
His death in Cataract Canyon had taught her that the wilderness was an abyss. It terrified her, and yet something in her craved it, made her long to be like Shep and Leah—and her own sister. And her whole being had always, since the first day she’d seen him, longed desperately and incurably for the person who was, to her, the earth and the wild.
Nick’s arm was around her, guiding her through the trees. He smelled like earth, like the piece of herself she’d lost. Maybe she was finding it again now.
Not in him—but in herself.
WHILE ZAC AND GRACE enjoyed the sauna and the natural pool, Nick and Day lay on Therm-a-Rest pads by the fire, two dozen feet away, and she continued “The Knight of the Cart.”
“Now, while Lancelot was searching for Sir Gawain, he was captured by men in league with the prince Meleagant, who had carried off Guinevere. The cruel captors sent word to the queen that Lancelot was dead. Hearing that news, Guinevere almost died herself, because she could not eat. And some people rejoice in bad news, and so the captors felt compelled to tell the captive Lancelot that the queen was dead. When his captors were distracted, Lancelot made a loop of his belt and put it around his neck and hanged himself from his saddle horn.”
Nick laughed at the melodrama.
“His captors thought he’d fallen from his horse, but then they saw the belt, and they cut him down. He had nearly severed the veins in his neck, and he couldn’t talk for some time…”
But soon after, Lancelot was taken to the castle where the queen was being held, where Meleagant’s kind father ordered his release. “Lancelot and the queen were overjoyed to see each other alive. In her good graces again, Lancelot asked why she had shunned him after he’d first defeated Meleagant in a joust.
“Because,’ she said, ‘you hesitated two steps before you got into the cart.”
Nick groaned.
“Lancelot knew she was right, that he should have obeyed love when love ordered him to mount the cart and that he should never have been afraid of what love demanded. He apologized to the queen, for she was right. Delighted with his company, the queen suggested they meet that night to enjoy each other’s love, and Lancelot readily agreed.”
Day stopped speaking, and Nick realized she was finished with the tale for the time being. He sat up on his mattress. Resting on one hand, he studied her face in the firelight. “Do you believe that? About love?”
“Yes. I think it’s right to trust in love. But we’re human. Sometimes it’s frightening.”
Nick already knew that. Do what love demands. Was he that brave?
Grace and Zac came out of the pool, shivering, and made a beeline for their tent. “It’s all yours,” Zac called over his shoulder, waiting for his wife to enter first.
Nick used a broken tree limb to roll rocks out of the fire onto a sled of branches that Zac had constructed. He dragged the sled with the rocks over to the sauna and shoved the hot stones inside, into the pit he and Zac had dug. While he collected water from the pool in the coffeepot, Day removed her boots and socks outside the sauna. Nervously she waited for Nick.
He set the coffeepot just inside the door of the sauna, and they stripped together. It made Day feel young as a child, and the hut of branches seemed like a child’s fort, too, when they ducked inside and she pulled the plastic tarp closed behind them.
“Watch out for the rocks.” His hand touched her leg, and she grabbed his wrist, blind in the darkness. “Come over here.”
Nick. She could smell him, the earth smell that made her whole. The skin and hair on his nearest thigh brushed hers as he poured water over the rocks, and the sudden spraying sound made her huddle closer to him. His arm went around her.
“Nicholas.”
“I love you.” Wet heat filled the small cramped space. Under its cloak Nick kissed her cheek, then her nose, then her lips. Their mouths opened, tongues sliding together in a kiss of mutual adoration. Her hand touched his stomach and slid down to hold his erection. “Day…” His voice shook.
You hesitated two steps…
The story spoke personally to Nick. He would never forget it. Lancelot had not been a criminal. Yet Nick was, and he deserved to ride in the cart. Love told him it would bring him to his queen and make their love whole as it never could be with secrets between them. Yet she would hate him! They wouldn’t end up in each other’s arms.
Tell her about Kelly, Nick. Start there.
He poured more water on the rocks, reminding himself how it was after Sam died, what he’d told her. It wasn’t even a house, Day, where we lived. He locked us in the dirt space underneath, and sometimes we were there for days, like animals, like rodents. She’d listened. She’d held him, never let him go. When he was done, she had made love to him.
The heat in the sauna built, like the heat underground in August.
“You tell a story,” she said.
He swallowed. His lady had asked. “Once…Once there was a…” A boy. He couldn’t. “Once there was…” It’s Day. It’s okay. “When Weather the chipmunk was small, he was trapped in a shoe box with his sister…his sister, Squeak.”
Day felt keenly alert, as though the sauna was washing a fog from her mind. Weather the chipmunk had a sister.
“The wild cat, Dark Face, who was their father, liked to leave them in the shoe box while he went out carousing far away, and sometimes he forgot them. They were hungry, and it grew foul in the shoe box. So when they were let out, they ran into the desert and hid. They didn’t want to be locked up again. One day, when Rousel’s—When Weather’s father…”
Rousel? Where did that come from? Day wondered.
“When Dark Face found him hiding, he broke his arm. A chipmunk can’t live with a broken arm, and his father knew that, but he had to wait to take him to the doctor until the other things he’d done to Weather had healed up.”
Day was glad he couldn’t see her face. Oh, God, what’s wrong, Nick? What are you trying to tell me that you can’t say without a story? The heat made her dizzy, but she listened so as not to miss a word.
“Two weeks later Dark Face took Weather to the doctor, and he took Kelly—he took Squeak, too.” Nick poured more water on the flames, wanting more heat to sweat it out of him, to make the story leave him, to make it gone and make him clean. “Squeak had something wrong with her. She had a condition on her chipmunk face that was a birth defect from her mother liking to carouse like Dark Face. To drink. She had…a cleft lip and palate. And the chipmunk doctor told Dark Face that it could be fixed, and Weather heard.
“One day when his father was sleeping off a drunk, he took Squeak and hitchhiked into town to the doctor’s office. The doctor remembered him and Squeak, and when Weather said that he wanted his sister’s face fixed, the doctor told him that if…that if Squeak went to live with a chipmunk couple he knew, they would pay to have Squeak’s face fixed.”
Nick poured on more water. The sweat drove down his face. It was too late to turn back now. Too late to leave the tale untold. Day knew. She wasn’t speaking. Just breathing. Waiting.
“Weather…” His voice was hoarse. “Weather loved Kel—Squeak, and he didn’t want her to go live with anyone else, so he took her home. And when many days and nights had passed, his father took his sister upstairs and locked him below. Locked him in the shoe box. And he heard his father…trying to…have sex with his little sister, Squeak.”
The sweat was coming out of his eyes. Why was he choking this way? His body felt so awful. He was dirty, like that place.
“I—Weather—He took her back to the doctor, and the doctor took her and told him to go away. And that was the last Weather heard of his sister.”
Day grabbed his body, slick with sweat, clinging to the muscles in the heat. Her fingers and limbs slipped on his skin, and she held tighter. “What did Weather do then? Tell me.” Running her fingers over his back. Feeling the hideous grooves at the bottom.
“Weather was afraid of his dad, because of…because he hit. But he was afraid of going to jail, too. The doctor said Weather shouldn’t tell anyone, or he and his father would go to jail. So he hid in the desert. He knew where the spring was, where his family got water. But he had to steal food from the supermarket and he got caught. Someone knew where he lived, and the police took him home, but when they saw the shoe box they took him away again, to live with…other people.”
And when he was twenty, Day continued to herself, he returned to southern Utah to find out what had happened to his father. He’d learned he was dead, that he’d passed out drunk in the road and been run over by a truck.
“Didn’t anyone ask what happened to Kel—to…”
“I said I didn’t know. I said we’d gone to town and I’d lost her.”
Nick poured the rest of the water on the rocks.
The hissing was explosive, the heat instantaneous and intense. Day had to lower her head against his back to breathe without the steam singeing the insides of her nostrils. Her sweat stung the scabs on her knees and elbows from her climbing falls that morning, but she didn’t notice. She noticed nothing but his heartbeat.
“I love you. I love you, Nick.”
“I hate me. I think she’s dead or something worse. I think I gave her to someone evil. Nobody good would want a seven-year-old with a harelip.”
Day clutched him more tightly. I can’t handle this. I’ve never been exposed to anything this bad. I don’t know how to help him.
“There’s no more water.”
They left the sauna. The night was cool, the water in the pool like ice. Day plunged in, her feet sinking into the slimy silt on the bottom. Nick did not come in. Abruptly he pushed into the brush, naked, and disappeared.
She stepped out of the frigid water, dripping. “Nick?”
“Don’t come!”
The words drifted back to her. She heard him running, breaking branches, and the sounds became smaller and more distant in the forest.
He could step on a scorpion, get cactus spines in his feet. He could get lost. They were in the Maze, for God’s sake.
Day dried herself with her clothes and put them on, knowing she wouldn’t follow him, wouldn’t be able to find him. She would be likely to take a wrong turn, to disappear forever.
But Nick was made of harder stuff. Desert-rodent stuff.
She was the one who’d told him about Iron Hans. Maybe now he was running to a place where he could call for the help of some wild hairy friend of his own—a giant to give him a strong war-horse and a band of warriors to fight the monsters in his head.
But if Nick had ever had such a helper, someone who gave him armor in which to face the world, it had been Sam Sutter.
And he was dead.