Michelle and Rocky met that first time on a weekday after school at a house where a bunch of teenagers were hanging out. Alyssa had a best friend at the time named Jessica and Jessica had gotten together with Rocky first. The two of them were together for just a few weeks, maybe a month. Alyssa didn’t even note his presence as remarkable, this bushy-haired stranger. It was only later, when Michelle confessed her feelings, that Alyssa could even recall Rocky. He had a muscly build and small pockmarks on his face. His hair was shoulder-length and layered. He was good-looking, girls said. Funny.
Alyssa said Michelle had been taken immediately with Rocky. He seemed approachable, solid. He was a decade older and had spent a year in jail in Texas on a drug charge, but that didn’t bother her. He had a job and his own place. There was something kinetic about an older guy showing interest in her. About not being under the wing of her parents. About having freedom.
That desire for freedom is why they’d moved in with Paul in the first place, of course. Paul was quiet, kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. His brain always calculating, fitting things together so they made sense. Maybe drank a little too much. But that’s the way of most men. Especially in a place like Montana, where the term “good ole boy” is as ubiquitous as a May snowstorm and can mean anything from a cowboy to a lawyer, so long as they toss back a couple of cold ones and know how to work a gun and tie a decent fly. Rocky was a good ole boy. Most of the boys Alyssa and Michelle and Melanie knew back then were good ole boys.
The day Rocky and Michelle met, they were all at the house of a couple who Jessica babysat for. The relations and friendships overlap in Billings like geographical strata. Everyone knows everyone or knows of everyone. The house had a pool table and a garage, where teenagers would sometimes just gather. When Rocky drove up and Michelle saw him she must have felt the pull way down in her abdomen, because they were, almost instantly, a couple. Two or three days and that was that, Alyssa says. Rocky and Michelle were flat-out in love by the end of that first week.
When Michelle confessed to Sally about her pregnancy, Sally wanted to press statutory rape charges against Rocky. She couldn’t believe a man of his age would go for a teenager like Michelle. What was wrong with him? But Michelle swore she’d run away with Rocky and the baby if her mom so much as walked in the door of the police station. It gutted Sally. Would Michelle really run away? Forever? How could she protect her if she couldn’t even find her? If she was out there in the world with a little tiny baby and not even old enough to drive a car?
Eventually, Sally sought the advice of a counselor, who advised her to wait it out, accept it as best she could, and try to stay supportive of her daughter. Rocky would get sick of Michelle. Sally remembers the counselor telling her, “He’s not going to like having a girlfriend who can’t go out and do anything.” By the time of her death, Michelle had been to a bar one single time in her life. She never went on vacation with a friend. Never had friends over. She wasn’t a part of a book group or a yoga circle or a young mothers’ club. She wasn’t a part of anything, really. Rocky was her world.
Alyssa wonders if the older guy she was seeing back when Michelle and Rocky met might have contributed to why Michelle was so hell-bent on being with Rocky. Alyssa and Michelle were best friends. Always. Even as toddlers. In family videos they are always right there beside each other. Barnacle siblings. Giggling, crumpling together in a heap in front of the striped couch in their living room. The day Alyssa learned to ride a bike without training wheels, Michelle was right there on the grass watching her wobble her way down the sidewalk on her pink bike with the white basket in front. Alyssa disappears from the camera’s view and then returns, slightly steadier, a proud smile on her face. She stops, doesn’t get her feet planted in time, and over she falls, her rear end thwacking on a peddle. Sally scoops her up as she bawls.
And then the next scene it’s Michelle’s turn, red banana seat on her silver bike. She jets down the same sidewalk on two wheels, then returns, and when she returns, she’s waving. Waving high to her father behind the camera, steering one-handed, grin as wide and confident as a moon sliver.
All the sisters were close. Melanie, the youngest, had ADHD, and after the divorce she had the hardest time. She’d scream, kick things, rage. Sally’s focus was so much on Melanie that Michelle and Alyssa were left to themselves. They ratted up their bangs, put on lipstick and mascara, and listened to Aerosmith and AC/DC. Michelle had a teenage crush on Steven Tyler. They hung around Pioneer Park or North Park. Sometimes they’d go up to the Rims, a sandstone formation eighty million years old that rings the city of Billings. The Rims draws hikers, backpackers, dog walkers, and errant teenagers. At sunrise and sunset it beams with a fiery beauty reminiscent of the red rocks of Sedona. You can stand on the Rims and see the whole of the Billings valley and beyond. Millions of years in that view, the dispassionate waves of time passing.
But the Rims has another association. Every year, it seems, there’ll be a body found up there, someone committing suicide, or someone running from the police who winds up injured or killed, falling from Sacrifice Cliff, a sandstone outcrop that juts into the Yellowstone River and has a five-hundred-foot drop at its highest peak. The story behind the name is that two Crow warriors returned to find their entire tribe wiped out by smallpox and they subsequently threw themselves off the cliff.1
The Rims is Billings’s most well-known landmark, home to marmots, mule deer, falcons, bats, hawks, and several different snake species, including the western rattlesnake. Diamond-backed and laced with venom. Eventually, Rocky would acquire such a snake, bring it to the house where he lived with Michelle and their two children.