What followed were unexpectedly peaceful hours. The trio marveled at the Milky Way as they lay in their sleeping bags. They awoke and were thankful that the night had been kind to them; they’d slept well. The redness and tingling in Tilda’s stung hand weren’t as bad. Beck’s knee was stiff when she first got up, but after walking around she declared it a bit improved. Her face was still a rainbow of sickly colors, but the swelling was receding. She planned to tell Afiya that she’d taken a careless tumble while rock-hopping across the creek. The slash in her arm, she’d say, was courtesy of the agave plant she’d landed on. Imogen’s injuries were mostly invisible, but she was hopeful they would heal better than her previous ones.
Before they left Slate, Beck went alone to where they’d abandoned Gale’s body. She disposed of his spear in a fissure between two boulders, and left the stranger’s pack nearby, stashed under some brush. Their intent was that his gear wouldn’t be spotted before Gale became skeletal remains, so no one could easily determine his cause of death. Let them think he died of stupidity, not a savage fight. Maybe they’d wonder if he’d had a fatal reaction to a snakebite, or died of an untreated infection; it wasn’t as if Gale would’ve sought help. Or maybe the Canyon would erase him, an irrelevant speck in a vast domain. The vultures, as Beck reported, were well on their way.
Imogen and Tilda never found Gale’s gun. Given the illusion of distance, and how hard it would be to tell one cluster of rocks from another, Imogen doubted if he ever would have recovered it.
They took only a short rest when they reached Boucher. Imogen secured the stranger’s backcountry permit to a twiggy bush near the entrance of the old mining tunnel. She wanted to affix it well enough that it wouldn’t blow away, while making it look as if it had simply gotten snagged there. Tilda crumpled it and tore it in half first, trying to create the impression that it had been ripped off. At the last minute, Imogen scrubbed both pieces with the hem of her shirt and smeared dirt on them to ruin their fingerprints. The authorities might look for Gale’s and it would be better to have no prints than the wrong ones.
“You watch too much TV,” Beck said to her for the third time that trip.
“Yup. It’s all research.” The task was serious but the mood was light; they all smiled. But Imogen knew she’d become a survivalist, willing—able—to do anything.
Their actions were disrupting the truth. But the dead were dead. Imogen, Beck, and Tilda would live with that truth forever, regardless of what anyone else knew. Or didn’t.
The walk all the way from Slate to Hermit was long. With rest breaks it took them almost seven hours, but they kept a meditative pace rather than a hurried one. At one point Imogen burst out laughing and they looked at her, expecting her to fill them in.
“Nothing. Inside joke,” she mumbled, unwilling to explain that the farther away they got from Slate, the more buoyed she felt. Fearless. Alive.
Periodically one of them would start singing and they’d all join in. It was a good day, a weird kind of good, but good.
As they were cleaning up after supper, Imogen crumpled the last chicken à la king package and stuffed it into their garbage bag—which had remained strapped to Beck’s pack during their entire misadventure. In the diminishing light, and completely by coincidence, she spotted among their trash…the missing Visine bottle. She fished it out, grinning. Some of her medical marijuana tincture still sloshed around inside. She slipped it into her hoodie’s kangaroo pocket and wandered off for a good-night pee.
When Imogen was safely where no one could see her, she did an unthinkable thing. Praying to the rocks and the ravens for their forgiveness, she threw the Visine bottle as far as she could. It might take a million years for the plastic to decompose, but she hoped the sun goddess and Canyon spirit would understand: some things had to be left behind. Imogen knew she couldn’t be her new self while carrying all the literal garbage of her past life.
It was their last night and again Beck and Tilda slept on either side of her. Though subtle about it, they seemed to have appointed themselves her bodyguards. Did they think she was going to fall apart? Or burst into nightmarish screams? It was sweet, if unnecessary—and a trifle funny when Imogen remembered how she’d once imagined herself as the weakling who would cower in their warrior shadows, tending to their weapons.
By the next day it was evident that they were all feeling an unburdened ease, a bolstered and triumphant energy. Even with Beck’s limp, it carried them fleet-footed up the difficult trail. They paused before the steepest sections to assess who most needed one of the two remaining walking sticks, and for short step-ups they shared, passing a stick down to the next person. As happens in the Canyon, after just a few days their muscles had been trained and their skills honed; even Tilda functioned with an assured competence now.
At Santa Maria Springs they took off their boots as they had on the way down, and refilled their warmed canteens with cooler water from the trough.
“Seven days,” Imogen said, wiggling her toes in a patch of sun.
That was all it had been, though time had stretched and spun and toyed with them like a cat with a mouse under its paw, indifferent to torturing a living thing until its heart gave out. They all felt the magnitude of those days. Tilda shut her eyes and tilted her face sunward. Beck looked toward the distant North Rim, hung like a picture in a frame of rock. They were both here, and there—that strange liminal zone that hovers between home and the journey, the journey and home. The present moment shared space with both past and future.
Soon they were back on the trail. Beck suggested taking another quick break when they reached the upper Hermit Basin and its little forest of juniper and pinyon pine, but instead they passed a canteen around and kept going. Their adventure was almost over; leaving had become a palpable thing, an invisible presence that hiked alongside them. For Imogen it was bittersweet. It certainly hadn’t been the trip they’d planned—something horrible had happened, almost beyond words. But in the Canyon, nothing was all horrible. The beauty, the holiness of this place was everywhere, it had never abandoned them. To recognize that now filled Imogen with a resurrecting surge of joy.
Beck’s Jeep was just as they’d left it. They shoved the packs in the back and it was only as they were clambering in that Imogen realized how dirty they all were.
“We’re gonna make a mess of your car.” Dusty red boot prints were already imprinted on the floor mats at Imogen’s feet.
“It’s just dirt,” said Beck.
How weird it felt to sit on a cushioned seat. To move without the effort of one’s own muscles. As Beck pulled out of the parking area she flicked on the radio, but after ten seconds of catastrophic news she shut it off.
Tilda, in the front passenger seat, plugged Beck’s phone into the charger. It had enough juice to turn on and, without comment or question, as soon as there was a strong enough signal she placed a call. She held the phone up, in speaker mode, and they all heard it ringing.
“Hello?” Afiya’s voice was a giant grin.
“Hey babe.” Beck fought back tears. “We’re coming home. We’ll be there soon.”