When I was a little girl, I loved playing hide-and-seek in the earthy hollows of pit houses and dark crannies of the rock caves where ancient American Indians once lived. I knew my father was fascinated with these places and that he liked finding things. I liked him finding me.
Later, I wanted to be like him. I spent hours beneath a blazing desert sun carefully excavating my Barbies from their shallow graves in the dry, clay earth. I even dismembered a few to make their plastic limbs more like bones that could be painstakingly cleaned and pieced together.
I believed the stories my father told in the light of the campfire, about the people whose ruins he restored. I remember the smell of smoke in the night as he talked about the existence of multiple worlds and how people traveled through them and became transformed along the journey. Somehow, I always imagined these worlds separated by a curtain as thick and black as the ones on our elementary school stage. The ones actors used to exit the stage, but sometimes couldn’t find the overlap and spent long seconds desperately groping the material before they finally managed to vanish.
A year ago, the curtains in my life parted a little, and I saw into a world that existed between my parents—a world defined by whispers as sharp as broken glass and the doors that slammed like shouts. I learned what a marriage looked like when two people hated each other enough to methodically shatter their world—and me in the process.
I had thought it was always better to know the truth.
I was wrong.
“She’s something, isn’t she?” My father mops his face with a bandanna. The armpits of his green, official park shirt are ringed with sweat.
We are standing at the base of the ruins of an ancient Native American dwelling built into a limestone cliff. It has taken us about a half-hour to climb the ladders to get up here, and both of us are soaked with sweat and slightly out of breath. There’s not even a puff of wind, and the sun on my shoulders feels hotter than the lasers we created with magnifying glasses in Mr. Zimmerman’s pre-AP physics class.
“She?” I lift my brows and ignore the deeper lines around his eyes that weren’t there six months ago. He’s thinner now, and more deeply tanned than I have ever seen him.
“If a ship can be feminine, so can these ruins.” He adjusts a battered Indiana Jones-style hat on his sweat-stained head. “So what do you think, honey? Was it worth the climb?”
“Sure, Dad.”
He tries to read my face to see if I’m being sarcastic, but my sunglasses hide my eyes. After a moment, his gaze returns to the cracked plaster walls. The custody arrangement says I have to spend the summer in Arizona with him. It doesn’t say I have to like it.
“This is where it happened, Paige.” My father walks toward the ruins. They remind me of a giant sandcastle, which are doomed things to begin with. This one, with its thick masonry walls and empty, blackened windows, is no exception.
“Hundreds of prehistoric American Indians—an entire civilization—disappeared. They left so suddenly that there was still food on the table. To this day, no one knows what happened.”
His voice lowers, and he gestures to the ruins. “Think about it. The people here invested hundreds of years in this place, building these homes, learning how to farm the desert, and then, overnight, they vanished.”
The irony of what he’s just said makes me laugh. I mean, it’s so exactly what he did to me and Mom. He pretty much disappeared.
He frowns. “What’s so funny?”
My father—the famous archaeologist—doesn’t see it, just doesn’t get it. And so I let my face go blank and say, “Nothing.”
He takes a swig of water from a canteen, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and then shakes his head as if I am impossible to understand.
The truth is that he could make the connection if he tried. But that’s the problem. He wants to pretend that everything between us is okay. To admit something is wrong might mean he’d have to do something about it.
“Come on,” he says, “I’ll show you around.”
He leads me into the ruins through a T-shaped entranceway so narrow he has to turn sideways to get inside. Small bits of sticks and mud poke out of the plaster walls like plants desperately trying to grow in bad soil.
The chamber inside is much smaller, darker than I imagined. The walls are blackened like the inside of a chimney, and they smell smoky.
“Careful, Paige,” my father warns, pointing out a hole in the floor the size of a manhole. When I peer into the dark opening, I see the pale stubs of a ladder reaching up like a pair of hands.
“What’s down there?”
“Another chamber. I’ll show it to you another time.”
He gestures me forward to the ladder leaning at a sharp angle against the blackened wall and then pauses to show me traces of fingerprints. They look fragile, like smudges of breath on a bathroom mirror. As I move closer to inspect them, my father places a hand on my shoulder.
“Careful. The oils from your skin…”
“…could damage them. I know.” I twist out of his touch.
Part of me wants to remind him that I could read a petroglyph before I could read Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. He’s forgotten this, however, and I don’t know which is worse. That he doesn’t remember who I was or that he has no idea of who I am.
The third level is as dark and gloomy as the second. We enter through a hole in the floor about two feet deep and weave our way through a narrow, stone corridor with a wooden plank floor and a rusted handrail bolted to the limestone wall.
The handrails, my father explains, were installed in the first half of the twentieth century when the ruins were open to the public. He strokes the blackened railing. “We’re going to take all those out and restore this girl to her original glory.”
His face has a dreamy expression, as if he’s imagining what these soot-blackened rooms will look like when he’s finished. I want to tell him that these dark, abandoned ruins will always be empty. And no matter what traces of the present he removes, it won’t change that the people who lived here are gone and he can’t bring them back.
My father prompts me forward, and we retreat into the shadows of small, low-ceilinged rooms filled with odd assortments of crude stone tables and broken pieces of pottery scattered about like rejects at a tag sale.
We climb higher, through another dark hole scabby with stones and even narrower than the others. The fourth level of the dwelling is a cavernous room that extends well back into the deepening shadows. The high ceiling is as sharp and jagged as coral. The side walls are scraped smooth.
Voices drift toward us. In the soft glow of lantern light, I see people clustered along the back wall. There are two distinct groups. One consists of Native Americans dressed in beat-up, baggy jeans and plaster-splattered T-shirts; the other group wears tan shorts and green park polos like my father’s.
The voices and work stop as my father and I get closer. “Hey, everyone,” he says, and then puts his arm around me. “I want you to meet my daughter, Paige.”
All eyes turn to me. My muscles go tight as he squeezes my shoulder as if he cares about me. As if today is not the first time I’ve seen him in six months. As if everything between us is okay. I want to shrug off his arm, but I don’t. I guess it’s okay to hate your father but not want to embarrass him.
“Your father has told us so much about you,” a tall, massively built man with long black hair and a face that looks chiseled from stone extends his hand.
“This is my foreman, John Yazzi,” my father says and releases me so I can shake hands.
The next person I meet is a short, muscular man with a broken front tooth and an impossibly thin braid that hangs to the middle of his back. His deeply calloused palms make his skin feel like leather. “Welcome. I am Jacob Begay.” His voice carries a Southwestern cadence.
“And this is Jalen,” my father continues. “John’s son.”
He’s tall, not quite as tall as his father, but enough so that my head comes only to his shoulder. He’s about my age, with deep-set black eyes, light-brown skin, and shiny black hair tied in a ponytail. His cheekbones are high, his nose straight, and his lips so full and perfect it’s hard not to stare, but my father already has gone on with the introductions. I shake the hand of another dark-haired boy without ever hearing his name.
My father continues introducing me, but their names slip past me. I steal another glimpse of Jalen and feel the sudden heat in my face when he catches me.
“And this is someone who doesn’t need an introduction,” my father says. Even without seeing his face, I hear the triumph in his voice.
My heart stops as a tall, deeply tanned blonde wearing a sage-green Arizona SciTech tank and a pair of black Nike shorts steps forward.
“Hi, Paige,” she says, smiling.
A rush of joy shoots through me, followed by a stab of something else. She is part of every happy childhood memory I have and some that I’ve worked hard to forget. For a moment all I can do is stand there staring. And then, as the silence turns awkward, I say, “Emily?”