THREE

The open duffel gaped a mockery at Lola Wicks.

In her days as a Kabul-based foreign correspondent, she’d kept a packing list in the back of her head like an open screen on her laptop, always mentally clicking it, seeing what needed to be replenished—Batteries? Outlet adapters? Pencils for when it got so cold that the ink froze in pens?—and what else she needed to add. She’d kept a go-bag with a few emergency essentials, along with a flak jacket that came down over her hips and whose reinforced collar stood up around her neck, protecting the vulnerable jugular and spine. Longer trips into Afghanistan’s restive provinces had necessitated days’ worth of planning, with items laid across the floor in an orderly row, the bulky generator at one end of the line, the suture kit—thankfully never used—at the other.

Now she sat in her bedroom in northwestern Montana, flummoxed by the prospect of a two-week vacation to Arizona that required nothing more than a few pairs of shorts and some T-shirts. Still.

“You don’t want to go.” The indictment harsh, the voice gentle. Her husband of two years, Charlie Laurendeau, father to their just-turned-seven-year-old daughter. It had taken him all of those years after Margaret’s birth to persuade her to marry, and a few months beyond that to take this trip, their ostensible honeymoon. And then only after he’d couched it in terms of visiting his lone sibling, a brother who’d left their boyhood home on the nearby Blackfeet Nation years earlier to marry a Navajo woman.

Edgar hadn’t been back since, not even for Lola and Charlie’s wedding. Given what she’d learned during her time with Charlie about Indians’ intense and all-inclusive version of family, Lola had drawn a few conclusions about Edgar because of that. But she kept them to herself, just as she had—at least, she thought she had—her feelings about this trip.

Charlie stood behind her, his blocky shadow dividing the shaft of sunlight through the open bedroom window. This far north, they didn’t need screens, the only bugs a few mosquitoes peppering the air above the shallow sloughs that provided splashes of blue in the golden sea of surrounding prairie. Lola tore her eyes away from the accusing duffel and turned to the window, letting her gaze skim over the plains to the great jagged wall of the Rocky Mountain Front to the west. Dark ropes of cloud bound the peaks, sliding down the slopes to spit a mouthful of pebble-like hail or even stinging snowflakes at unwary hikers who foolishly trusted in summertime.

Every year people died in those mountains, shoved off narrow ledges by gleefully screaming winds, drenched into hypothermia by icy gray rains, or on the rarest of occasions, masticated into unrecognizability by irritable grizzlies. Lola, years removed from her job as a foreign correspondent, ended up writing about all of those things in her present job as a reporter for the local Magpie Daily Express. Still, the sight of the mountains, with their unwavering demand for respect, always steadied her.

“I’ll miss it here.” Too late, Lola bit her lip. The words were already out. She had spent much of her life rejecting attachments to people or places; now she had a husband and child who brought with them an extended family of aunties and uncles and elders on the reservation.

“You’ll like it even more after a break.” Charlie dug the heels of his palms between her shoulder blades. “You’re stiff as a two-by-four.” He knuckled a stubborn knot of muscle. “A two-by-four layered with marbles. Sure you don’t want to rethink counseling? Maybe when we get back.”

Lola shrugged his hands away and took one in her own, twining her fingers in his, a basket weave of brown and white. “It’s been a year. I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.”

It was as much as they ever talked about it. Lola had always been on the high-strung end of the spectrum, fresh from Afghanistan when they’d first met, still sizzling with adrenaline, a horse with a bit in its teeth and eyes rolling toward every possible escape. Charlie had been smart enough to know that only a very long rein sustained their relationship, although Lola periodically rebelled against it, even after Margaret had come along. Charlie accepted the danger inherent in his own job as county sheriff, but often fretted about Lola’s penchant for putting herself in harm’s path.

A year earlier, though, while reporting a story in Wyoming, that tendency had ended up getting not just herself but also Margaret nearly killed. At which point Lola had fled back to Magpie. There, she contented herself with covering her beat, the Blackfeet Reservation, but of necessity whatever else was happening around the region—the usual small-town-newspaper fare of weather stories, farm reports, and the occasional tourist-related disaster on the Front. She acquired, as the saying went, a “mile-wide, inch-deep” knowledge of commodities prices, snowpack levels, wildfire movements, fracking, land-use disputes, local centenarians’ birthdays, and, always and forever, weather. Some days, she even relaxed into a shimmering sort of stillness that another person might have identified as happiness.

Overall, though, her new passivity disturbed her husband as much, if not more, than the old recklessness. He hadn’t even been able to drag her away from Magpie’s endless howling winter for a long weekend in the warmth and brightness and people-on-the-streets cheer of Great Falls or Missoula. “No,” she’d said, her eyes straying toward the window, the black wall of mountains barely visible beyond the billowing curtains of snow. “I don’t think so.” Followed, again, by “I’m fine.”

The honeymoon to Arizona, then. “Dammit, you’re not fine,” Charlie had said when he proposed it. That was all it took. The old Lola raised her head. Curled her lip. Margaret stood by her father, both of them holding their breath. A look passed between them: she’s faking it. Margaret owed the lankiness that was chasing baby fat from her bones to her mother, along with an unyielding jaw and gray eyes hard with skepticism. The obsidian hair, the brown skin, the unnerving calm, that was Charlie.

“A honeymoon,” Lola had said. “Why not?” Fists clenched behind her back, nails clawing her palms, breaking the skin in stripes. “Arizona sounds nice.”

Oxygen had flowed back into the room, and Lola gave thanks for a husband kind enough to pretend he believed her lie.