“Dale and Jeremy both like you,” Emily states a few days later. “You should pick one and put them out of their misery.”
Today she’s taking me to see Tacoma Well, which—after the ruins in the cliffs—is the park’s biggest tourist attraction, about a mile from the information center. The path, lined in small stones, is barely wide enough for us both and completely shadeless. Although it’s barely nine o’clock in the morning, the sun is already blistering; it feels like heat is growing out of the ground like an invisible crop. I’m quickly coated in sweat and dust.
“I don’t think they’re exactly in misery,” I tell her. “I just met them.”
“I know,” Emily replies, “but you should have some fun this summer. I want you to like it here. Dale is better-looking, but Jeremy has the brains.”
I study the ground in front of us. As kids, we would never have stayed between the lines of a defined path. I almost want to kick some of the stones out of the way.
“Look, I’m not dating either of them. Besides, I’m already having fun.” I say it in such a purposely morose tone that Emily laughs and pushes my shoulder.
“You’ll like it here,” Emily promises. “And you’re right. You don’t need either of those guys. It’s going to be you and me—just like the old times.”
I give her a quick, sideways glance. Is she going to talk about what happened? Do I even want her to?
“Look,” she says, “we’re here.”
Tacoma Well is an enormous, round sinkhole filled by an underground spring with water the color of green JELL-O. The stones lining the well are rough, jagged, and porous-looking. It takes me a few minutes, but then I realize some of the black spots between the stones are not just gaps, but small caves.
“Hold on,” I say as Emily starts to climb down past the rim. Pulling out my cell, I begin snapping pictures.
Emily strikes a pose, pretending to be falling over the edge. I snap the shot and then a couple more of her. We take some together, too—crazy ones that sometimes cut parts of our heads out of the photo because I hold out my arm and shoot without looking where I’m focusing.
Afterward, we climb down into the well. The pitch is steep, and the only sound is the shuffle of our hiking boots on the stone. It’s so easy to feel time slipping away, that Emily and I are ten years old again and exploring, something that feels comfortably familiar and yet totally strange, as if I have dreamed the last seven years of my life.
We climb down several levels of semi-collapsed cliff dwellings. The blackened, caved-in openings seem more suited for giant bees than as the homes of prehistoric American Indians.
We’re not the first people to hike down here. There’s all sorts of graffiti cut into the rock, some even dating back to the 1800s. I bet it ticks my dad off to see it, and this makes me smile.
We spend the next couple of hours exploring some of the larger caves. Most of them are too collapsed to go into, but there’s one large enough for us to crawl partially inside. Once we’re sure there aren’t any snakes or scorpions, we lie on our bellies in the shade and hang out, talking about everything and nothing.
When we were little, we used to do this a lot. I always thought that first impressions were the strongest—that the first breath of air, the first time you stepped inside an old pit house or a cliff dwelling, physically did something to you. The scent entered your body and brought the traces of whoever lived there to life. At least that’s what I used to tell Emily and how every game began.
Of course, now I know that it was just my imagination, but back then it was so easy to believe it was something more. That Emily and I weren’t playing house as much as we were reliving parts of the lives of the people who had lived there. In our fantasies, we were sister-maidens living out the mythology of the stories we heard our fathers tell us as we sat around the campfire every night.
Back then it felt so good to have a sister—even if it wasn’t real. It doesn’t justify the things we did, but maybe it explains what happens when the lines of what’s real and what’s fantasy get blurred.
On the way back from the well, I see Jalen emerging from a cluster of gnarled, small-leafed cottonwood trees growing out from around the banks of Otter Creek. He’s with a thin, elderly man with a brown, wrinkled face the color of nutmeg and feathers braided into his graying black hair. Jalen carries a recyclable grocery bag in one hand, and a branch of cottonwood the width of my arm sticks out of the top.
“Hello,” Emily says.
My gaze goes to the slight frown on Jalen’s face and then returns to the fragile-looking man standing beside him.
“Who’s that?” the man asks, looking straight at me.
Jalen’s mouth tightens, and he steps closer to the older man. “That’s Dr. Patterson’s daughter. Come on, Uncle.”
My cheeks burn. Dr. Patterson’s daughter. He doesn’t even remember my name. So much for hoping that he felt the same connection I did.
Jalen’s uncle smiles at me. “She has pretty eyes,” he says, smiling with almost childlike pleasure. “The blue corn maiden.”
He’s missing a tooth, and his hair is greasy. If I ran into him on the street, I’d think he was homeless, maybe mentally ill. But his eyes shine with intelligence, and despite his physical frailty, there’s something solid and strong about him.
I can’t help smiling back at him. “Thanks.”
“Uncle,” Jalen prompts. With one final glance, the older man allows Jalen to turn him in the direction of Otter Creek.
I stare at Jalen’s back, feeling hurt and stupid for thinking maybe he was the one who’d filled my water bottle for me, that it was some kind of silent acknowledgment that he felt something for me. It’s obvious now that my imagination is still capable of leading me into trouble.
“So that’s why you don’t want to go out with Dale or Jeremy,” Emily teases as soon as they’re out of earshot.
“Are you kidding me? He doesn’t even know my name.”
“He knows your name,” Emily replies.
“Then why not say, ‘This is Paige Patterson?’” I shake my head. “Not that it matters,” I add the last part quickly and then firmly. “It’s not like I care.”
Emily laughs knowingly. “Yes, you do. You can’t fight it, you know.” She links her arm through mine. “Sometimes it just happens and there’s nothing you can do about it except see where it leads.”
“It’s not going to lead anywhere. Seriously, Emily, you’re making this all up. I don’t like him.”
But she isn’t and we both know it. All these years have passed, and yet she still reads me so easily. I know suddenly that this is the test of a friendship. That time and distance don’t matter. She’s always been my best friend, and I should have fought harder to hold onto her. Instead, I listened when my mother said she was trouble.
Emily stops walking. “Ask him out,” she urges. “You have to do it. You have to be the one to do it. You’re the boss’s daughter.”
“Are you kidding? He doesn’t like me, which is totally fine. I’m not interested in dating anyone.”
“You say that,” Emily says, “but even you don’t believe it. Every relationship is a risk. Sometimes you just have to go for it.”
I shake my head, but I think about Jalen, about how closely he walked beside his uncle as if he wanted to be able to catch him if he stumbled. What would it be like to have someone looking out for me? To care about me like that? I cross my arms and then release them angrily because I don’t want there to be this deep ache inside me. And I especially don’t want to rely on some guy to make it go away.
“No way I’m asking him out.” I raise my brows. “I wouldn’t go out with him if he begged me.”
She rolls her eyes. “Paige,” she says, teasing me in the way only a very old friend can get away with, “just who are you trying to fool? Stop dreaming and start living.”