“Go away!” Cece yelled out the window.
“We’re supposed to go hiking? Remember? I rang the doorbell three times.”
“Four,” Cece said. “You rang it four times.”
“It’s seven o’clock.”
“Exactly!”
“When I said I’d be here,” Garrett elaborated.
He’d found his way to the backyard and was standing next to the clothesline, from which a row of colored underwear drooped like a chain of prayer flags. The underwear might have embarrassed Cece if she’d been less tired, or if Garrett himself looked any less ridiculous. He was wearing a new cap—was it actually denim?—and a pair of shorts that covered one knee but not the other. It looked like he’d cut the legs off some chinos, paramedics-style, after a car crash. She leaned out the window.
“Wow. You look awful,” he said.
“Please go away.”
“I don’t mean awful in a, you know…bad way. You look great usually.” He frowned, chewing his lip. “Not great great. I didn’t mean it like that. Just a lot better than you do now.” He chewed his lip again. “Not that you don’t look good now. You look totally fine.” God, his poor lip! “I mean ‘fine’ as in ‘okay.’ ‘Adequate.’ The literal meaning.”
Cece told him she’d be down in ten minutes, mostly to keep him from devouring his own face. Was he really yelling at her from the backyard, telling her how awful she looked? Why the hell had she agreed to go hiking so early? And who, when they said seven o’clock in the morning, actually meant seven o’clock in the morning? Served her right for agreeing to it, even if she’d been grateful to Garrett for giving her a tour of the local thrift stores. Instead of renting dinnerware for the wedding, she’d had the idea of buying vintage dishes: how quaint and charming it would be, for everyone to eat off mismatched plates! Charlie, of course, had immediately enlisted Garrett, which, given the man’s taste in apparel, made a certain amount of sense. He was a Goodwill connoisseur. To Cece’s surprise, he’d been patient and unglowering, driving her around town, waiting in his truck while she scoured every junk shop in Salish. It helped that he barely spoke to her, more interested in listening to the local news on the radio, which had something to do with “sustainable timber harvests.” So it surprised her when he asked her on a hike. Cece had been standing in the Margolises’ driveway, holding a circus tower of vintage plates. It had seemed easiest, at the time, to say yes.
Also, what else was she going to do? Cece was feeling a bit unemployed. She’d been in Montana two weeks now and had already met with the caterer, the florist, the photographer; she’d found a hairdresser she liked in town; she’d approved the playlist sent to her by the DJ, who was to come on after the Feckless Fiddlers. Her dress, sized and fitted, was hanging in a closet. She’d written her vows, revised them several times. Why had she imagined she needed a month to prepare for the wedding? She’d imagined it because life often failed to match her perception of it, and because the aphorisms in her head (A Montana wedding can only be planned in Montana!) were often unrelated to fact.
Cece got dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and the floppy felt hat that Charlie said made her look like Faye Dunaway. Then she sat on the bed, worried she might cry. It was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. Incredibly, they’d originally planned to have the wedding today, but Cece had come to her senses and realized that what in theory seemed like an homage to her mother would be the worst idea ever, an emotional suicide vest. It still felt that way, her mother’s death: like something she strapped on every morning, concealing it craftily from others. Cece had been seventeen. Her father, a computer-chip broker who woke up at one every morning to do business with China, had explained that her mother had stage-four cancer and might not make it through the summer. Cece had not believed a word. Her mother was an air force psychiatrist, a captain; she wore fatigues to work, went to the gym three times a week, drank snot-green smoothies that smelled like manure. Cece responded to the preposterousness of the news by going on a bender. She’d already been experimenting with drugs and alcohol, strictly on the weekends; now she applied herself. Her mom had brain cancer, and it was time to party. With the help of Paige, her best friend, she drained her parents’ liquor cabinet, drove drunk to parties, passed out on the stairs. Once a guy she’d never met turned up at her school, claiming he’d held her hair the night before while she puked. Cece had no recollection of him at all. Meanwhile, her mother embarrassed her, always on the couch and greeting people in her bathrobe. She lost her hair and eyebrows and looked like a seal. She barked like a seal as well; the radiation had done something to her diaphragm, and she hiccupped exuberantly in a way she couldn’t control.
Even after her mother was taken to a hospice—even after the case manager had called the house one Sunday at five a.m., telling her father to come in—Cece believed everything would be fine. It was all a stupid misunderstanding. Cotton-mouthed, hungover from a night of tequila shots with Paige, she’d entered her mother’s room and thought she’d opened the wrong door. But no. This terrible creature was her mother. She stared at Cece with watery eyes, opaque and unseeing, the way a lizard might. For the first time, Cece recognized that something was happening not only to herself but to the woman lying in front of her. She forced herself to approach the bed. Her mother plucked at her sheets with one hand, peacefully almost, as if she were picking buttercups. Yet she wasn’t at peace; she was deeply distressed. Her lips trembled. She held out her hand, as if inviting Cece to arm wrestle. Cece grabbed it. “Come closer,” she said, surprising Cece with her strength. Her breath smelled like scorched butter. Cece leaned in close, expecting a secret. “Come closer,” her mother said again, clutching Cece’s hand so hard it hurt. Cece leaned in closer, as close as she could possibly get, hugging her mother so tightly she worried her bones—like kindling, like Popsicle sticks—might break. And yet her mother said it again, “Come closer,” as if she had something vital to tell her, something urgent and remarkable, if only Cece would obey her. But Cece couldn’t do it. Unless she dissolved into a gas, got sucked up somehow into her lungs, there was no way to get closer. She tried to explain this to her mother, but she just repeated her command, gently but firmly, as if she were imploring Cece to clean her room. Come closer.
By the time it occurred to Cece that her mother was dying, she was dead. Even then, it seemed like possibly a mistake, like there was no way in hell her mother would have agreed to it. Cece hunched through the memorial service, unable to speak or move or smile. People hugged her, one after another, a series of random blows. At the national cemetery, she stood on the perfect lawn rolling down to a smudge of ocean in the distance, the tombstones a run of dominoes waiting to be tipped, feeling like she’d been beamed to an alien planet. She could not fathom her own fingers. It was a military burial, with guards of honor and a flag-folding ceremony and a lone bugler playing taps. The long, sorrowful notes floated over the cemetery, turning everything into the tragic plot point in a movie: the gravesites and their wilting flowers, the guards of honor frozen like statues, the hole in the ground where her mother would be lowered and transformed into a skeleton. Such was the grace and beauty of the bugler’s playing that Cece, returning to Earth for a moment, couldn’t help being moved. It seemed to give form to the precious void inside her. Then the bugler stopped in midnote, as if he’d forgotten what song he was performing. He turned red with embarrassment. Finally, he took the bugle from his lips and shook it, and it played the lost note for a second, as if possessed by a ghost. It wasn’t a real instrument at all, Cece realized, but a stereo made to look like one. The thing had run out of charge. A couple of the mourners giggled. Cece glanced behind her, startled. Later, in the middle of the eulogy, the bugle began playing again from its case.
Strangeness and sorrow. Strangeness and sorrow. Cece went back to school, amazed that her life still existed. My mother is dead, she told herself, over and over, not immune to its dramatic value. It was precisely this sense of being in a play or a movie that made her death feel temporary. At any minute the play would end and her mother would be alive again, taking her to the beach like she used to every weekend; Cece would massage her head while they watched stupid shows together, dizzy with the smell of sweat and jojoba oil. (That smell! When Cece was little, she used to suck on her mother’s hair, put strands of it in her mouth.) Cece missed her so much it howled through her like a wind. She stopped eating. On the soccer field she stood there shivering, staring at the grass. Her friends, understanding at first, eventually gave up on her, stopped asking her to parties and the Galleria, to bonfires at the beach. When her father wasn’t home, Cece sometimes sneaked into his room and stripped the mattress, gazing at the orphaned sweat stain, pale as a shadow, where her mother used to sleep.
Once, the phone rang and Cece picked it up: her mother’s hair salon asking to confirm an appointment. “She died,” Cece said, perhaps too softly to be heard, because the woman on the phone said, “I believe so, yes. A coloring. Missed the last one, so wanted to confirm.” The next day, Cece drove to the hair salon and showed up for the appointment. The hairdresser didn’t question who she was. He led her to a chair, then grabbed a book of color swatches and handed it to her. Cece flipped through the book—a rainbow of tiny rabbit’s feet—and found one that matched her mother’s hair. She smelled the swatch, but of course it smelled like nothing. She cried and cried, for the first time since the funeral. The hairdresser, perhaps used to such things, ignored her. He painted and foiled Cece’s hair, then rinsed it out and revealed the hideous product of her grief.
“You’re different than Charlie,” Garrett said now, driving up Route 35 on their way to Glacier Park. She was beginning to feel half-awake, mostly because of the “expresso” in her hand. Montana’s tendency to misread the cues of gentrification—to transform everything, essentially, into fast food—was refreshing to her, heartening even, but only after ten a.m. (When Cece had tried to order an Americano, the teenager at the coffee stand had raised her voice and begun enunciating carefully, as if she were a foreign exchange student.)
“How do you mean?” Cece said.
“In college, he used to leap out of bed every morning like it was on fire.”
“He still does that.”
“Does he still yell ‘Rise and shine!’ at the top of his lungs?”
“Not anymore,” Cece said ominously.
Garrett laughed. She immediately felt guilty about ganging up on Charlie, then stupid for feeling guilty when they were just joking and it was actually a tribute to Charlie’s wonderfulness that they were poking a bit of fun at him. And that was the wonderful thing about Charlie: he made you excited about getting out of bed. Well, maybe not about getting out of bed, but definitely about the rest of your day. It was the “shine” part that chiefly interested him. He woke up and did things, which inspired you to do things too.
“Actually, it’s something I admire about Charlie. He’s a man of action.”
Garrett took off his denim cap and set it on the dash. “Yep. One of them.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged.
“I mean, yes, he can sometimes seem a bit…overeager,” Cece said, annoyed. “It can feel strange to an introvert.”
“You’re an introvert?”
“No. Not really. I just mean it can sometimes feel…I don’t know. Like he’s turned inside out.” Garrett glanced at her. What was she talking about? She’d never thought of Charlie as being “turned inside out” before—the words themselves had never crossed her mind—and yet the phrase had plunked out of her, fully formed, like a gumball.
“What do you mean?”
“After we see a movie, Charlie always wants to talk about it right away. Like as soon as we’re walking out. But I need to let it sit for a while. Especially if it’s a good movie. Like it’s over, but not actually over.”
“You’re still dreaming,” he said practically. “You haven’t fully woken up.”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“He did the same thing in college. Used to drive me crazy. We’d go see something great, part of the film series, you know—McCabe & Mrs. Miller—and he’d start dissecting it the second it finished. Sometimes he couldn’t even wait for the credits to roll.”
Cece frowned, feeling even guiltier than before. She felt tricked and disloyal, bamboozled into bad-mouthing her fiancé. Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut—or better yet, stayed in bed and avoided this whole stupid trip? She could have been waking up right now and having an actual coffee, one that could spell.
“How did you guys meet anyway?” Garrett asked. “Charlie didn’t tell me.”
“In med school. Johns Hopkins. Or rather, he was a resident and I was in med school. We bonded over missing LA.”
“You’re a doctor too?”
“Don’t act so surprised,” she said. “But actually, no. I’m not. I dropped out second semester.”
Garrett nodded, as if dropping out of one of the best med schools in the world was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. He didn’t seem shocked or appalled or worried for her future. Even Charlie, who’d supported her decision and wanted her to be happy, always seemed embarrassed when she told people about it, rushing to clarify that she had other ambitions for herself, she wouldn’t be temping for an architecture firm for the rest of her life. (She’d solved this already by quitting a month ago.)
“You know how Charlie’s so passionate about working in the OR? I just never felt that way. Like it was my calling in life. Mostly I just felt, I don’t know…exhausted all the time. Exhausted and stressed and like I was missing the best years of my life.” She frowned. “I looked at the students a bit older than me—Charlie’s friends, who’d started their residencies—and their hair was all going gray. In their twenties.”
Garrett sneaked a look in the rearview mirror. His hair was thinning on top, tapering to the hidden glade of a bald spot. Perhaps he was vainer than Cece thought. “Charlie’s not going gray already, is he?”
“Charlie! No. He sleeps like a baby, even on call. He’s like designed by NASA or something.”
The tone of Cece’s voice surprised her. She didn’t tell Garrett about suffering through four years of premed in college—all that chem and bio and, sadistically, biochem—thinking the whole time that med school would be different, would flip some magic switch in her soul and make it all seem worthwhile, all the books and movies and happy hours she’d missed, the beach trips and road trips and camping trips, and then sitting in Genes to Society one day, bored to tears and half-delirious from four hours’ sleep, and realizing that she had no interest at all in being a pediatric neurosurgeon, even though she’d wanted to be one since she was fourteen. It was all a big misunderstanding. Something about the words themselves—“pediatric neurosurgeon”—had appealed to her, she’d seen them in a book somewhere and they’d sparked her curiosity, an interest that was immediately affirmed by the grown-ups around her, eliciting misty-eyed looks of pride—Cece here, on the honor roll for the third time in a row, wants to be a pediatric neurosurgeon!—which encouraged her to seek further approval and start telling everybody that she wanted to be one when she grew up.
It had been the same thing, strangely, with baboons. Ever since Cece was a little girl, she’d claimed to love baboons. She’d had baboon T-shirts and a baboon lunch box and even a stuffed baboon as big as an armchair sitting in the corner of her room. Her father had given her the stuffed baboon when she was five, because he’d asked her what her favorite animal was and he’d misheard her when she said “raccoons.” She’d meant to correct him, but he seemed so taken with the idea that she loved baboons that she didn’t want to disappoint him. He’d bought her the baboon for Christmas, joking about how long it had taken him to track one down—by then, of course, it was too late to speak up. Soon everybody was giving her baboon things. It became part of who she was, so much so that she convinced herself she really did love them, dressing up as one for Halloween and drawing them obsessively at school. She even had an imaginary friend: Oonie the Baboon. But it was all a mistake. If her father had thought she’d said “wombats,” or “beluga whales,” she’d be a completely different person.
She ended up telling Garrett this last part, about the baboons, and what did he do? Laughed, his mouth a strip mine of fillings. Practically ran off the road. It was the first time she’d seen him look even slightly happy.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
“It just makes perfect sense.”
“Charlie thinks it’s hilarious too,” Cece lied, realizing only as the words left her mouth that she’d never told him about it. Why hadn’t she? Well, he wouldn’t have understood. He would have asked, very reasonably, why she hadn’t just corrected her dad from the beginning. “Then my mom died, and going to med school became about, I don’t know, this earth-shattering thing. Like I could make up for it or something. But of course, that’s ridiculous. Why are you wincing?”
“Just that term. ‘Earth-shattering.’ ”
“What about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing what?”
“It’s just a…pet peeve.”
“A pet peeve?”
“Sorry. Nothing to do with you. It’s just that we’re destroying the planet for real and no one seems to give a shit—and then something bad happens to one of us, a human being, and it’s ‘earth-shattering.’ ”
It was not her imagination: he was a major fucking asshole. How the fuck did Charlie tolerate him? Cece closed her eyes, doing some full yogic breathing—or whatever it was called when you were driving to Glacier with a sanctimonious asswipe instead of doing yoga. She just had to get through the next couple weeks. Prove her eternal love for Charlie—make sure the wedding was fun, lovely, free of surprises—by not calling his best friend in the world a prick. It was a kind of test. A challenge. Like one of those fairy-tale things, where the suitor has to kill the dragon to prove himself worthy.
When she opened her eyes, Garrett was watching her instead of the road. She forced herself to smile. This must not have been a complete success, because Garrett regarded her with mild concern.
“What is it you want to do then? With your life?”
“Good question,” Cece mumbled. Also a strange one, as if your life were a tool that had only one function. (Someone had handed you this weird thing, your life, and now everyone kept asking—quite reasonably, perhaps—“So what are you going to do with that?”) She knew what she didn’t want to do with it. But what did she want? Well, she wanted to marry Charlie, but that wasn’t a real answer—she wasn’t so shallow, so nineteenth century, as to think that marriage was the mysterious function her life was designed for. It was merely a bonus feature: a lovely one, but not the reason she was put on earth. She’d hoped her love for Charlie might clarify things, help her figure out what to do with her life, but so far it had only confused it. She saw how people reacted to him—an ambitious young doctor, out saving lives—and it left her feeling more marooned than ever. Not just marooned, but occasionally a little bit vexed. Annoyed at Charlie through no fault of his own. She didn’t want to be a doctor; but even more than that, she did not want to be “a doctor’s wife.”
She was sure she had something great to offer the world, something big and pure-hearted and indispensable. If only she could figure out what it was.
In the meantime, she was planning a wedding. A relief, really, to dodge the question of her future for a while. You might even call it an avoidance strategy. But why had she insisted on having it out here? Cece suspected it had to do with Charlie’s family. With the Margolises. It was here, in this wonderful house, that she’d seen them together for the first time: Charlie and Mr. and Mrs. Margolis and his brothers. (His brothers! She was a little in love with his brothers.) They were everything she’d always wanted from a family: warm and jokey and unburdened by grief. They had Ping-Pong tournaments. They Hail Mary–ed sodas to each other. Random words—“colander,” say, or “sticky bun”—made them burst into hysterics. They had rituals no one could explain, like touching the roof of the car when they passed a tractor. They had Wednesday game nights, beloved second-rate movies that made them cry, a fridge so stuffed with food that opening it was a concussion hazard. A country unto themselves, with their own customs and traditions. (Cece especially loved the leader of this country, Mrs. Margolis.) Just being around them made Cece instantly happy, even delirious. It was like the click that Tennessee Williams talked about, when you’ve drunk enough that you begin to feel okay in the world. Something clicked for Cece in the Margolises’ presence, made the strangeness and sorrow dissolve into a buzz of well-being. She got drunk on Charlie’s family. And so she’d come to the place where she’d felt so at peace: this lake; this gabby clubhouse; this museum of happy summers.
“Well, what do you like to do with your time?” Garrett persisted. “When you’re not planning weddings.”
“Are you always this nosy?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say. I don’t really talk to people.”
“I like to read books,” Cece said, because it was true. In college, she’d been happiest in the library, reading thousand-page monsters for her Golden Age of Russian Lit class. Not just reading them but discussing them with other people. Saying smart things about them and hearing smart things back. She’d taken every lit course she could fit into her schedule, and not only because her premed classes bored her to tears.
“What’s your favorite novel?”
She thought of trying to impress him with something from left field: Independent People, say, or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. “Anna Karenina,” she said finally.
Garrett smiled. “I knew it.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said angrily. It wasn’t enough that he’d ruined her favorite spot on earth; now he was trying to ruin her favorite novel. Probably he’d never even read it.
“Do you have a favorite scene?”
“Do you?” Cece said, calling his bluff.
“I asked you first.”
“When Kitty gives birth and Levin expects to be, you know, madly in love with the baby. But then he sees it for the first time and is repulsed.”
Garrett looked genuinely startled.
“I guess you didn’t expect me to say that.”
“No,” he said. “Kitty and Levin, I got that. But I thought you might say the dinner party scene, when he asks her to marry him again. While they’re playing secretary.”
“Well, I love that scene too.”
“But it’s sentimental. They read each other’s thoughts perfectly. It’s not life.”
“They’re both life.”
Garrett studied the road, seeming weirdly unsettled. She’d been trying to be provocative, choosing the birth, so it surprised her to realize the scene really was her favorite. (Or up there anyway.) Of course, Cece would never have admitted such a thing to Charlie. The idea that you might be disgusted by your own baby would be as alien to him as jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge—or finding a marriage proposal, enacted through a word game, anything but romantic. A bad taste entered her mouth, like the ghost of a burp.
“Oh god,” she said. “Tell me you’re not one of those down-with-marriage people.”
Garrett shifted in his seat.
“You’re officiating our wedding!”
He frowned. “Uh-huh. Well. That wasn’t my idea.”
“Mine either!” Cece said. “Why didn’t you say no?”
“I don’t know. It seemed so important to Charlie. He kept saying how much it would mean to him. I mean, he never asks for anything—he’s always the one helping me out. It didn’t seem polite to bring up my, um…philosophical objections.”
Cece snorted. She was beginning to wonder, dismally, if the wedding would be a disaster. “And what are those?”
Garrett flipped his sun visor down. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“Look, Charlie and I love each other. Our marriage isn’t going to be derailed by one person’s opinion.” Especially a baggage handler in homemade shorts, she almost added. “Anyway, it’s not like I don’t know it will be hard sometimes. It’s supposed to be an adventure, right?”
“ ‘The only adventure open to the cowardly,’ ” Garrett mumbled.
“What sad lonely fuck said that?”
“Voltaire.”
Cece laughed. “Didn’t Voltaire, like, write dirty letters to his own niece?”
“Have you actually thought about what it will mean?” Garrett said. “Devoting your life to another person?”
“Of course,” she said.
“How long do you think real attraction lasts, before the mystification wears off?”
“If you’re talking about my attraction to Charlie, I can’t imagine it ever wearing off.”
“Everyone says that.”
“In our case it’s true,” Cece fired back.
“Everyone says that too.” He flipped his visor back up. “Is there something right now—a weird quirky habit of his—that you find endearing?”
“Well, sure,” she said, playing along.
“What is it?”
“He shakes his sandwich before eating it. Between bites, I mean. Like he’s weighing it in his hand.”
“Three years from now, that’s going to drive you up the wall. You’ll see Charlie shaking his sandwich and be like, Eat your fucking lunch already.”
“You’re wrong.”
“And then, let’s see, the babies will start coming, and you’ll be too wiped out to do anything. You’ll never be able to travel or see a movie or read a real book. I’ve seen it happen to my friends from college—Charlie’s friends. You know how you’ll spend most of your time on earth? Trying to get your kids to stop fighting. Conflict mediation. There’s your great adventure for you. You’ll be so bored inside from devoting your life to babysitting that you’ll do something pointless, like remodel your kitchen. Just to distract you from your boredom. Maybe you’ll remodel it over and over. And you’ll have a big fat mortgage, you’ll have to send your kids through college, you’ll sacrifice Life at the altar of your children. It’s the American dream.”
Cece stared at Garrett. Why wasn’t she more offended? Mostly she felt sorry for him. His “objections,” such as they were, weren’t even original. It was like he’d been preparing for an oral exam—possibly even hoarding quotations, the way a squirrel collects acorns.
“I’m guessing you weren’t born this way,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, something must have happened to make you so anti-love.”
Garrett looked at her in surprise. “I’m not anti-love. Just anti-marriage. Two completely different things. Opposites, in fact.”
“Love and marriage are not opposites!”
“ ‘Marriage is the tomb of love.’ ”
“Not more Voltaire,” she said.
“Casanova, I think.”
Cece rolled her eyes, though in truth this was the first thing he’d said that gave her pause. She had never thought about her love for Charlie this way: that there was something particular about marriage, the institution itself, that might destroy it. “I think we’d better find another officiant,” she said.
Garrett, who’d been going eighty miles per hour, slowed up on the gas, as if he were thinking about maybe turning around. “I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have told you all this.”
“You’re right,” Cece said flatly.
“Hey. I’ll say all the beautiful things, I promise. Marriage-is-beautiful things.”
“But you’ll be lying.”
“I’ll want it to be true,” he said. “That’s the important thing. I’m not about to sabotage my best friend’s wedding.”
He said this so sincerely, with such urgent tender feeling, that Cece had a mysterious reaction. A strange kind of disappointment. Not that she wanted him to sabotage the wedding, of course—just that she hadn’t expected him to disown his convictions so easily.
Garrett kept his face to the road, one eye squinched up like a pirate’s. There was a sadness about him that seemed almost disfiguring. She wanted to ask him about what had happened to him in college, about the death of his and Charlie’s friend, about his mysterious troubles in San Francisco, but she was worried he’d dislike her for prying. Or worse: he’d tell her all about them. Anyway, it was there already in his face, like mineral locked inside a rock. It was not a bad face; in fact, it was kind of handsome, or maybe a better word for it was “striking,” if you ignored the slight snowman-crookedness of his eyes and focused on the darker depths. Cece—so used to looking at Charlie, who was mineralogically all on the surface—had forgotten there were people who walked around like that, as if waiting for someone to smash them open.
They passed a roadside attraction advertising a Live Grizzly Encounter, which made Cece wonder what Garrett looked like naked. Not because she wanted to see him naked—dear god, no, she’d rather encounter a live grizzly—but because she remembered a story Charlie liked to tell about his college days, how he and Garrett and some equally stupid friends would get drunk sometimes and stage their own, as he called it, “roadside attraction.” This involved stripping out of their clothes and posing like Greek statuary by the side of the highway, surprising drivers as they turned a bend and caught them in their headlights. Naked discus throwers, but with Frisbees. Charlie couldn’t tell the story, even to Cece, without crying from laughter. The idea of Garrett taking part in such a thing seemed impossible; even picturing him with a Frisbee, fully clothed, was beyond her powers.
Garrett rolled down his window while they waited behind a string of cars to get into Glacier Park. Cece imagined asking him to play the Movie Game—or maybe Fortunately/Unfortunately, like she and Charlie did when they were stuck in traffic—but it was as hard to picture him doing this as it was to imagine him having fun in college. In front of them was an RV whose fender was plastered with bumper stickers: Choose Happy; Happiness is a Warm Tent; Happiness is Being in Montana.
“Let’s put them out of their happiness,” Garrett said.
Cece stared at him.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.
“It’s just…I’ve never heard you make a joke before. That was even kind of funny.”
“Thanks?”
“Charlie told me that,” she said. “How funny you were.”
“You’re still looking at me.”
“How did you get that little scar there? On your cheek?”
“Frostbite,” he mumbled, in a way that precluded follow-up questions. She afflicted him with her gaze—or so it seemed. Unlike pretty much every other man on the planet, he did not like to be looked at. “Anyway, Montana has the second-highest suicide rate per capita in the nation.”
“They’re bumper stickers!” Cece said.
“What’s your point?”
“No point! Just that you don’t like marriage. Or happiness. You must be the most cynical person I’ve ever met.”
He glanced at her, his eyebrows clamped into a vise. My god, was he hurt?
“I’m not cynical,” he said earnestly. “I just don’t trust people who advertise how happy they are. The happiness cult.”
“I’m happy,” she said, trying to lighten things up. “And you’re somehow tolerating me.”
“That’s true.” He smiled, or did his best impersonation of someone smiling. “Maybe you’re not as happy as you look.”
Inside the park, Garrett pulled over to the Lake McDonald Lodge so they could use the bathrooms, parking beside a van with a Legalize Jesus magnet stuck to its door. When Cece emerged from the ladies’ room, Garrett was nowhere to be found. She waited for him in the lobby, which was gargoyled with the heads of majestic beasts: moose, elk, bighorn sheep. She wasn’t sure this set the right tone for a national park. While Cece waited for Garrett to emerge, a group of children with compasses dangling from their necks gathered in front of the fireplace. The children were dressed like British military commanders, in knee-high socks and khaki shorts. One of them blew into a pitch pipe, tentatively, and they broke into song. “O Everlasting Light.” Their voices were beautiful, breathtaking, angelic as a church choir’s. They beamed at the crowd of visitors, impressed by their own virtuosity. People stopped what they were doing and gathered to watch. Brightest of all on earth that’s bright / Come, shine away my sin. Cece found herself thinking of her mother—always her mother!—of the musty, agonizing pews in the Episcopal church they went to when she was a girl. Still, she loved singing the hymns, mostly because her mother’s voice was so beautiful; it seemed to come from somebody else, a different mother entirely, like a ventriloquist’s trick. Cece knew nothing about this other mother except that God did something to her, made her shining and mysterious, which aroused Cece’s jealousy. She pictured Him in black orthopedic shoes and Bermuda shorts, like the old men they saw at the beach. She was sad, at age five, when her dad—much more of a believer than her mom was, despite the singing—snatched Cece from this secret mother and began sending her to Sunday school. Hearing the name, she’d thought it would be a school where they learned about Sunday. Instead, they’d learned about Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark and the various things God did to his children who misbehaved. Sometimes Ms. Sissel, their teacher, would read to them from the actual Bible. Cece still remembered the second verse of Genesis, which had made little sense to her but struck some gong of terror in her heart. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. She lay in bed at night, thinking about the Deep and its hideous face and wondering, too, what would have happened—where Cece herself would be—if God hadn’t said “Let there be light.” What if He’d simply forgotten? Or overslept? Or had laryngitis? After reading aloud, Ms. Sissel had asked them to draw Creation, the beginning of the world, and Cece had colored her piece of paper black.
Ms. Sissel hadn’t liked this. Another time, she’d handed out a worksheet called “Words to Describe Yourself,” and Cece had spent a long time, longer than anyone else, trying to figure out what to put down. Nothing that popped into her mind seemed right. If she said “fearless,” she also meant “scared.” If “joyful,” then “gloomy” too. Whatever she thought of, the opposite seemed equally true. So Cece made up some words to describe herself: “blahphoric,” “selfishless.” When Ms. Sissel saw them, she seemed offended, angry, even—which surprised Cece—and threw the worksheet in the trash. So Cece wrote what everyone else wrote: “friendly,” “adventurous,” “helpful.” It was the first time she realized people didn’t really care who you were; in fact, they were happier when you lied about yourself.
Garrett emerged from the men’s room at last but then seemed to have some trouble navigating past the gift shop. He froze under a sheep mount, staring at the identically dressed children assembled by the fireplace, their faces lifted in song. Cece watched him from across the lobby. Was she imagining it, or was he rooted in fright?
“Are you okay?” she asked after they were back on the road.
“Yeah,” he said unconvincingly. “Why?”
“In the lodge you looked—I don’t know.”
Garrett blushed, staring at the windshield. He fiddled with the radio, though he’d told her earlier there wasn’t reception in the park. They’d begun to climb now, looping east and leaving the river behind. “It’s something that happens to me sometimes. Things start to look sort of, I don’t know…impossible. I can’t really explain it. People are the worst. It’s like they don’t belong. I’ll see them standing on two legs, wearing these freaky lace-up things on their feet, and think: Who invited them?”
Cece laughed. “You don’t think that about yourself?”
“That’s just the feeling I get. I’m trying to describe it. You know how Levin feels disgusted by his own baby? Imagine if everyone made you feel that way. Like they’re supposed to be related to you, right? But there’s been a terrible mistake.” He grimaced. “I just want to spray them with something, to reverse the error.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “A can of something. Human Off! or whatever. Something to make them disappear.” He glanced at her. “I don’t actually want to kill people,” he explained.
“That’s good.” She stared at the uneven legs of his shorts.
“Probably it was the animal heads in there. There’s generally a trigger.”
It occurred to Cece, for the first time, that he might be mentally ill. But something was happening to her. The hairs on her arms felt strange, astir, like filings under a magnet. It had begun when Garrett told her she wasn’t as happy as she looked. They drove up the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which was so crowded with vehicles that Garrett could drive only about five miles per hour. This was the national park experience now, he told her: an endless clusterfuck. Most people didn’t even bother to get out of their cars—or if they did, it was to pull over at a viewing area and snap a few pictures.
“I can see why they want to, though,” Cece said, crouching down to see as much through the windshield as possible. The road had been blasted right out of the mountain and taken eleven years to build, which seemed like a hell of a lot of work, even for a road that went to the sun. Three people had died building it, Garrett explained; in places, they’d had to use so much dynamite that the crew wore socks over their boots to prevent sparks. She had the sense he was telling her all this to impress her—not with his knowledge but with his dullness. He was trying to sound as uncrazy as possible. Though he also seemed to genuinely love the place, hanging from the steering wheel to gawk at views he must have seen a hundred times before.
They passed a sign for something called the Weeping Wall. Just as the name suggested, it seemed to be in tears, water streaming down its face. A crowd of tourists was taking pictures. Towering above the wall, so high it looked like a painted backdrop, was an enormous saw-toothed ridge, as finely ribbed as the sail of a dinosaur.
“Zowie,” Cece said. “Look at the size of those cliffs.”
“That’s the hike we’re doing,” Garrett joked.
“Charlie was right. You’re hilarious.”
“Should have seen this place when I was a kid,” Garrett said. “Talk about zowie. There were a hundred and fifty glaciers.”
“How many are there now?”
“Twenty-five, I think.”
“God.”
“Soon they’ll have to change its name—Slush National Park—or doom it with tragic irony for the next thousand years.”
Cece was sad about this—the wall, it dawned on her, was weeping glacier tears—though honestly she couldn’t imagine the place being any more glorious than it was. People might look at it and drop dead. OD on beauty. Peaks soared all around them, as if competing for God’s attention; one of them, so big it gave you the feeling of an alien arrival, was wearing a necklace of clouds. A silver waterfall dangled beneath the clouds, fine and glittering and still as thread. At the bottom of the valley, far, far below them, the river was no more than a squiggle; a hawk wheeled back and forth, puny enough to trap in your fist. For a moment Cece was borne aloft, released, the demands of her life as small and distant as the river.
Then she started to feel dizzy, not borne aloft at all. Cece pinned her eyes to the road. She was a little scared of heights. Okay, more than a little. She tended to forget this in LA. The fear only popped up occasionally, typically on vacation—climbing the stairs of the Eiffel Tower, say, or soaring over a gulch in a chairlift—so she had a habit of forgetting it was there.
They got to Logan Pass and drove around searching for a space. After twenty minutes of sharking the lot, Cece felt the elation of the drive up melting away. It was hot in Garrett’s pickup: the air-conditioning didn’t work very well. After about the tenth trip around the parking lot, they lucked into a spot by the visitors’ center, next to a Chevy Suburban the size of a house, inside of which a cage match appeared to have broken out. A boy, maybe five years old, was screaming at the top of his lungs, trying to yank something away from his older sister, who was yelling out the opposite window for her father. The mother sat in the passenger seat with her hands over her ears. Eventually, the father burst out of the bathroom as if from a starting gate: three hundred pounds maybe, and yet he sprinted at full tilt across the parking lot, the ice in his drink shaking like a maraca. The effect was mesmerizing. The kids stopped fighting and watched him through the window. At the car, the man flung open the door to the backseat and pulled the boy out with his free hand before sitting him on top of the roof. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” the father yelled, practically in tears.
“Should we report him or something?” Cece asked after the family had trooped, tear-streaked, to the visitors’ center, weirdly united by the scene they’d put on.
“Report what?” Garrett said, sitting beside her on the gate of the pickup to retie his hiking boots.
Cece stared at him. “That father!”
“I don’t think you can report a father for having a bad day.”
“ ‘Bad day’? That guy was abusive!”
Garrett looked up from his boots. “You can’t imagine ever losing your shit like that?”
“My god. No. Not like that.”
“Ever?”
Cece stood up from the tailgate. “I can promise you I’ll never scream ‘Shut up!’ in my child’s face.”
Garrett smiled.
“I won’t,” she said, annoyed.
“Want to bet?”
“Sure. A million dollars.”
“A hundred,” Garrett said, sticking his hand out. “Let’s make it reasonable.”
Cece took his hand and then released it almost immediately, in midshake. They had never touched before. His hand was slender, more girlish than she’d expected—a shock. She cleared her throat.
“Anyway, if I don’t win, I would like you and Charlie to kill me.”
“I hope you do win,” he said seriously.
At the trailhead, Garrett led her onto a dirt path that wound through a meadow of purple daisies, billions of them, as if all the flowers on earth had flown there for a convention. Cece had a hard time believing her eyes. She’d heard the word “purple” all her life, had arrogantly presumed she knew what it meant, but clearly there’d been some kind of misunderstanding. She’d been a prisoner in a cave. Before long they were walking along the edge of a cliff, steep enough that you could see straight down to the road, all the miniature rental cars lined up like a row of candy buttons. A terrible thought chilled her scalp.
“Wait, is this the hike you pointed out from the road?”
Garrett nodded.
“You said you were joking!”
He looked at her curiously. “Why would I joke about that?”
Cece felt faint. Phantom hands materialized at her back, aching for a push. She did her best to ignore them. The trick was not to look down, to keep her eyes locked on the Nalgene bottles going slish slosh slish on Garrett’s hips. He had on a kind of fanny pack that doubled as a holster for water bottles, like a cowboy who’d taken a wrong turn at the Alamo and ended up at Angkor Wat. When she got tired of staring at Garrett’s hips, there were other things to distract her, alpine vistas and little splashing waterfalls and glacier lilies drooping obscenely in the sun, petals peeled back to expose their genitals. Bear grass—that’s what Garrett called it—bobbled in the breeze. Each stalk of grass foamed with tiny flowers, exploding in a plume of white. Cece slipped her camera from her pocket to take a picture.
“Don’t ruin it,” Garrett said.
“I’m not going to ruin it.”
“Photos make beautiful things uglier and more boring,” he said. “And ugly things less ugly and more interesting.”
Cece laughed. “Is that an aphorism?”
The path narrowed significantly, until they were edging along an actual precipice. It wasn’t a trail so much as a bas-relief. Cece’s knees went weak. A green rope had been eye-bolted to the rock. She grabbed on to it. The hands on her back were less ghostly now, seemed to be exerting palpable force. She inched along the cliff, trying to ignore the preschool wobble in her legs, clenching the rope as if it were a literal lifeline. A line of life. The back of her T-shirt, drenched with sweat, had turned to ice. The trail followed a bend in the cliff; she closed her eyes and inched around it as best she could, summoning years of expensive yoga coaching to silence the Voice of Doubt, to become as mindful as possible, but she was full of mind already, or at least the mental image of herself bouncing like a Barbie doll down to the road. Her mind was kind of the trouble.
When she opened her eyes again, she was staring at a mountain goat. It was white and woolly and blocking their way, eating some needlegrass growing along the fringe of the trail. One of the goat’s horns had fractured at the root but hadn’t fallen off completely, still dangling from its head. The broken horn hung rakishly over one eye.
“Wow,” Garrett said. “That’s one ugly goat.”
Cece tried to smile.
“Even a mother couldn’t love that goat,” he said.
Garrett swung his waist pack off and unzipped the pocket to take out his camera. As he was doing this, Cece made the mistake of glancing down. The world seesawed, trying to dump her off the cliff of its own accord.
“Want to test my hypothesis?” he asked, holding out his camera.
She shook her head, clutching the rope with two hands.
“Hey, are you all right?”
“Make it move,” Cece said quietly.
“I’ll try. But this is his home. We’re the wildlife to him.”
“Please!” she said. “No fucking nature sermons.”
Garrett looked at her in concern. He tried to shoo the goat away, doing a kind of plane-rescue thing with his arms, waving them in the air, but the ugly creature only continued to graze, its head bent to the ground. Flies buzzed around its broken horn. They were trapped. There was no way to get past—the trail was too narrow—and Cece didn’t think she had it in her to turn around. The mountain goat inched closer to get at some lichen, causing a landslide of pebbles. Cece sat down on the trail, close to tears.
“This isn’t a great place for a picnic,” Garrett said.
“You think this is fucking funny? That goat almost killed us!”
“That goat did not almost kill us.”
“It caused a landslide!”
“That was a pebble hitting some other pebbles.” He took off his hat and peered valiantly past the ugly goat, which had flumped down on the trail as well. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”
“What?”
He paused. “Actually, I don’t know. It’s just what people say in situations like this. Why didn’t you tell me you were so scared of heights?”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a fuckface?”
Garrett frowned. “You don’t actually like me very much, do you?”
“No shit! I don’t like you at all! I’ve been pretending for Charlie’s sake.”
“I’m that awful?”
“You told me my mother’s death was a pet peeve!”
“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. He tugged his hat back on, then fiddled with his stupid water holster, tightening the strap until it cinched him like a girdle. Jesus, was he going to cry? “I don’t know why I said that. There’s something wrong with me.”
“Ha! You think?”
“My father’s dying too,” he said.
“Boo-hoo! Who gives a shit!”
A breeze picked up, tickling Cece’s armpit. She gripped the rope tightly, like someone on a runaway bus. She was hanging on for dear life. Garrett tried to get her to stand up, explaining that they could return the way they’d come, nice and easy, Imagine you’re on a big flat beach, but her fingers wouldn’t let go of the rope, even when he tried hoisting her up himself. They were like someone else’s fingers, far stronger than her own. The goat looked at Cece and Garrett, as if they’d finally captured its interest. They were mounting a play for its entertainment. Eventually, Garrett sat down beside her.
“I’m going to kill that ugly goat!” Cece said.
“If you’re going to kill something, it should probably be me.”
“Okay,” she said earnestly. She looked down at the tiny, sun-bound cars—a grave error—and felt the trail pitch like a boat.
“Here, grab my hand instead of that rope,” Garrett said. “We’ll stand up together.”
She refused, then refused again, and then—acknowledging that she had no other option but to let go of the rope, the sooner the better—refused once more. Finally, after the fuckface continued to badger her, sitting there on his fuckass and holding up his fuckhand for her to grab, Cece took a deep breath and dropped the rope and gripped him instead. They sat there for a minute, holding hands. Judging from the look on Garrett’s face, she was squeezing hard. Was he bleeding? Probably it was just sweat. Patiently, Garrett knelt on the trail and then asked her to do the same—deep breaths, prayers to a God she didn’t believe in—and then he got to his feet very slowly and pulled her up with him, supporting her so her legs wouldn’t buckle, Cece clinging to him like a toddler. Garrett said something in a calm voice—she didn’t catch a word of it, nor did she care—and then he very gradually and delicately transferred her weight to the ground, forcing her to trust her own feet.
Cece stood there panting. Garrett began to coax her in the direction they’d come from, away from the triumphant goat, leading her by the hand while she clutched the guide rope with the other, doing everything in her power not to look down. It was harrowing and then merely distressing and then kind of doably uncool. She was aging in reverse, gaining limberness with every step. By the time they reached the end of the guide rope, the trail widening into a slope gentle enough for flowers to grow on, Cece felt almost bipedal again.
She just about kissed the ground. How horizontal it was! For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that Flat Earthers might not be lunatics.
She was still holding on to Garrett’s hand. Squeezing it, actually, just as hard. Of course, she would have held anyone’s hand on that cliff: Idi Amin’s or Jack the Ripper’s.
Then something strange happened. Garrett relaxed his grip, trying to release her, but she continued to hold on to his hand. She didn’t let go of it. Was she trying to hurt him? It had stopped being a fear thing, or maybe it was a different fear entirely, something impervious to rescue. His hand was thin and sweaty and full of hand parts. He quit trying to let go, squeezed hesitantly back. Come closer, her mother had said, as if some secret might be imparted to her. She was waiting, still; waiting and waiting. A ground squirrel peeped at them from a hole in the dirt. Cece let go of Garrett’s hand, as if she’d been bitten.
Her hand ached. She was trembling. It felt like that: a bite.
She sniffed her fingers when Garrett wasn’t looking. Why? They smelled like the rest of him: vaguely of food, like the ice at the bottom of a cooler. Garrett, blushing, stuffed his hand into his pocket. Perhaps he’d seen her from the corner of his eye.
They hiked back without speaking. One of those silences that dug itself deeper and deeper, each step like the pitch of a shovel. Cece trailed a few yards behind, tasting the dust from Garrett’s boots. The water sloshed in his holster thing. She was thirsty. Totally parched. But the silence was too thick to breach. Anyway, he didn’t seem interested in stopping to offer her a drink. And why would he be? She’d called him a fuckface. Even scoffed at the news that his father was dying. She’d started—now that she could walk again—to feel somewhat guilty.
Cece stopped, finally, waiting for Garrett to notice. She thought he might keep going without her, just slosh back to the parking lot on his own, but instead he slowed after a few steps and turned in her direction. He did not look insulted. He looked dazed, stricken, almost as if he were ill. He walked back to where she stood. A dragonfly was perched on the button of his cap, like a propeller. It had all happened before, or seemed to have, in precisely this way.
“Could I maybe get some water?” she asked.
He gazed at her, squinting in the sun. She might as well have spoken Bulgarian.
“Water?” she tried again.
“Yes!”
Cece took the bottle from his hand, careful to avoid his fingers. Raising it to her lips, she was distracted by some approaching hikers, an out-of-shape couple and their kids. The screaming family from the parking lot. The son was perched on the dad’s shoulders, smiling like it was the greatest day of his life.