Each of his companions has distinct reactions to Hunter’s story: Paul, who seems to have gained respect for him now that he can see Hunter has also endured legitimate anguish, welcomes him to the club; Austin keeps saying, “Dude, that sucks,” and now stands closer to Amber as if to prevent her from escaping; and Amber becomes deeply invested in the issue of the ashes themselves, suddenly very concerned about Hunter’s need for closure. She is young and she still believes in simple solutions to complex problems. By now, Hunter has heard many promises of impending closure, this notion that at some point if one performs the right action, chants the right series of words at the right time, then suddenly everything will be better, the well of grief is stopped up and everyone can pretend the past never happened. And she is convinced that for him to progress from his current state, what he needs to do is let the ashes fly, send them out on the wings of the wind and watch as Kait wisps across the earth, destined to land, who knows where, maybe in an eagle’s nest atop a craggy mountain somewhere, or to whistle into somebody’s nose and be sneezed out into a handkerchief, or to tumble and settle back into the soil. Austin seems to have only a casual interest in the ash-spreading cause, but wants to support Amber, who keeps saying things like, “It’s no big deal, I like to be helpful,” even when nobody has thanked her for doing this or called her helpful, and so they are both grilling him for background information in order to develop a psychological profile of Kait and make an informed decision.
AMBER’S IMAGINATION IS LIMITED to things she has seen in movies and on TV, and so she chooses the Grand Canyon as the perfect setting for the release, envisioning a purely cinematic moment in which Hunter stands on the precipice of the canyon, delivers a heartfelt—not to mention long overdue—eulogy, and then frees Kait from her confinement, liberates himself from his heartache. She’s more animated now than she has been for most of the trip: flinging her arms about like a visionary film director, she is preemptively teary-eyed as she describes the beauty of the scene. In the car, she does not sleep, asks to hold Kait, sometimes shakes the box beside her ear like a child investigating a Christmas gift, like she’s expecting to hear Kait’s voice whispering secrets of the afterlife to her. Hunter has made no promises to open the urn, only says they should see the canyon regardless, and along the way, he holds Kait up to the window so she can see the landscape, first flat as a dinner plate, then furrowed like a shar-pei’s face, now jagged and imposing. The roads become more populated as they approach their destination, broken-down cars pulled over on the shoulder as men kick tires and pop hoods. The heat still incredible, the night sky red like a cooked crab, the sun rising early and angry like a colicky baby. Over time, it becomes easy to take for granted that those towering hills in the distance are actually eight-thousand-foot-high mountains, to become inured to being surrounded by postcard views of the world. Vacationing sometimes is nothing more than a hunt for the best views possible, but the current views are cheapened by the promise of the majestic sights that might be just down the road.
A pamphlet told Amber about a new structure called the Grand Canyon Skywalk, which at the moment can only be reached by driving for about fourteen miles on an ungraded, unpaved road. Paul turns onto the non-road, loose stones pinging off the windshield, the car rocking like a rowboat tossed in rough seas. Paul is grumbling about the car being dinged, about ruining his tires. He says, “Goddamn canyon is a thousand miles long and we have to go to the worst part.” Amber assures him it will be worth it, because the majesty of the place will be such that they will be rendered speechless, and they’ll be able to conduct a somber farewell ceremony to Kait, who Amber says is kind of like a sister to them all now, the way they’ve bonded. She says, “You owe her this. She would have wanted this,” with such conviction that it is almost possible to forget that Amber knows nothing appreciable about Kait or what Hunter owes her or what she would have wanted. Since the revelation of the ashes, Amber has spent an inordinate amount of time saying things about Kait like she sounds great and she was an amazing woman and she was a beautiful person. They all talk about her like she was an inspiration, putting her on a pedestal just because she’s dead, probably because they think this is what he wants to hear, but it’s not at all what he wants, because he already knows all the lovable and admirable things about her, and what he really wants is for someone to just tell him it’s okay to feel broken and he’s under no obligation to feel better. What they’re doing is they’re commandeering her memory and twisting her into the image of someone they can admire. They’re allowing her to act as an avatar for their own deceased loved ones. They’re stealing her from him, and he needs to reclaim her by making some kind of decisive action.
When they reach their destination, Paul parks behind a line of seven tour vans. Only three hundred feet away, a U-shaped walkway juts out over the canyon like a plexiglass tongue. There are about two hundred people on the skywalk, leaning over the rails on both sides and searching toward the bottom. What happens here is what happens at most tourist venues: tour groups arrive, stroll around aimlessly, take dozens of pictures to prove they were here, then they go away after a few minutes because they’re hungry. Many of them have no particular interest in experiencing their experiences, as opposed to simply recording those experiences. If Kait were here, she would want to pose for a nice picture along the edge of the skywalk, and he would pose with her, despite his worries about both of them falling over the rail in a freak accident, and despite his longstanding objections to vacationing just for the pictures. Years ago, standing on the beach in Portland, Maine, watching all the other couples lining up for their photos of the sun sparkling on the water, he tried to explain why he hates how a good vacation is defined not as a time for growth and learning about other cultures but rather as going to a place where you get a lot of good pictures as evidence of worldliness or wealth or whatever. She listened quietly and said: “You would have a lot more fun if you let yourself have more fun.” And here he is, still in line for the skywalk, and posing in a group photo with his companions and Kait. As much as he complained about the proliferation of amateur photography, he finds himself playing exactly the role he once rejected: a man in an interesting place, just hoping to capture something, even if he doesn’t know what it is. He’s wasted so much energy in his life raging against things without any particular reason besides that he didn’t understand them; would it have been so hard to just take some more pictures with Kait? Would it have been so bad to smile for two seconds and wait for the flash and then move on without needing to editorialize? Amber uses Hunter’s phone to snap a picture of him with Kait standing at a rail along the edge. But he decides not to upload it, hasn’t uploaded a photo since revealing the truth about Kait to the others. He thinks about deleting the picture entirely but also has to admit, it is pretty amazing, the view.
Being surrounded by tourists is like being besieged by funhouse mirrors. There are old people, young people, fat people, thin people, slovenly people, well-dressed people, and they all look a little bit like everyone else at the same time that they look slightly different. Most of them move in pairs.
When Hunter’s group gets their turn to test the skywalk, Paul grips the interior rail and does not look down, shimmying rigidly along the frosted opaque edge of the walkway. Austin stomps through the middle, stares down and jumps, causes the walkway to vibrate and sends a few people into momentary panic. It is more frightening up here than Hunter thought it would be; obviously thousands of people have done this same thing before them, and obviously the skywalk has passed countless safety tests conducted by certified engineers, but still he holds on to the rail, shuffling as if walking on ice, and steps gingerly into the middle of the walkway as if dipping a toe in a freezing lake. He wants to stay away from the rail because the thought of dropping Kait over the edge is nightmarish, and so he forces himself to stand in the middle and look down—a vertiginous view into a seemingly endless scar gouged into the earth, a wound dealt to the continent that eventually became part of its character. Standing here is like levitating; at any moment he could plummet like Wile E. Coyote and disappear in a cloud of dust. He loses himself in the search toward the bottom, scans the layers of sediment in the walls, the changing colors like the test pattern on a TV, a visible record of millions of years of evolution. The reminder that nature is prehistoric, is infinite. When he looks up, they’re all gone.
He finds them outside the gift shop. Amber and Austin have bought a Native American dream catcher, which she says they can hang over their baby’s crib, a comment that causes Austin to physically recoil. Amber turns to Hunter. “So when are we going to do the ashes?” she says, clapping her hands in a school-marmish chopchop way that makes him feel like he has somehow failed her.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It just seems a little bit arbitrary.”
“But it’s amazing up here,” Amber says. “If I was . . . if I had passed on, I’d want to be spread out here. One last romantic gesture.”
“She liked nature and everything, but this is just a place.” Austin wanders off, kicking up mounds of dirt and then sifting through them as if searching for fossils. Paul jingles his keys in his pocket.
“You have to do it somewhere,” she says. “Why not here?”
“What’s the rush?”
“Are you kidding me?” she says. “That was the whole point of coming out here.” She looks like she has to restrain herself from yanking the urn from his hands and disposing of Kait in front of him. Hunter grips Kait tighter, prepares himself for a fight.
“Who ever said I wanted to come here?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did we inconvenience you?” she says. “When you invited yourself to join our vacation, should we have asked you for permission to do what we wanted? Was it rude for us to ask you to stop lying? No, no, don’t say anything, I’m just trying to apologize, I feel so bad about going out of our way to do everything for you while we’re on our vacation.” She sucks in a harsh breath. “Maybe next time instead of telling us what’s wrong with everything you can do something about it.” She waves a dismissive hand at him and turns away, kicks a loose stone into the canyon. “I mean, what the hell do you want?”
Hunter listens for the sound of the rock hitting bottom, but it is a sound he will never hear. Austin has returned, and rubs a soothing hand on Amber’s back. It took less than two weeks for him to alienate his new friends; the only people who have ever been able to tolerate long exposure to him were Kait and Willow.
Paul sidles up to him, says, “You’re looking hungry.” With an arm on Hunter’s back, Paul guides him toward the car.
THE NEXT MORNING WHILE Paul is gone on his walk, Austin asks Hunter if he drinks. Hunter says no, not really, so Austin asks him what he does for fun. Hunter says, “I like to get high sometimes,” and before he has finished speaking, Austin unfurls a plastic bag containing a half ounce of musty smelling marijuana. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Austin says, but he doesn’t wait for an answer, because he’s already packing a glass bowl that Amber has extracted from her suitcase. In hindsight, Hunter realizes that Austin and Amber have both been getting high throughout this trip—the glassy eyes, the frequent use of Visine, the constant snacking, the inexplicable and sudden onset of fatigue every afternoon. It’s hard to figure why they’ve included him now; maybe they had thought he was a narc. Maybe news of Kait’s death humanized him. Maybe they’re just feeling generous. Or maybe they’re offering an olive branch after yesterday’s blow-up.
They smoke in the bathroom with the exhaust whirring, towels stuffed under the doors, water running in the sink, and the pot hits Hunter harder than he expected because he hasn’t smoked since that night months ago with Willow. The others, they’re fresh out of college, so their tolerance is high as it will ever be. They shotgun hits into one another’s mouths, Amber grabbing Hunter’s cheeks, closing in on him intimately and blowing the smoke into his lungs as if delivering CPR. They alternate between giggling and hacking and listening at the door for Paul, and when they emerge from the bathroom, a thin line of smoke trails them like a pursuing wraith. After opening the windows, they run down to the hotel’s vending machines and load up on snacks for the upcoming ride.
On the road, the world looks more vibrant, the colors on the mountainsides bleed into one another, blurs of light surrounding the car. Conversation progresses in stops and starts, bursts of noise that mean essentially nothing but seem incredibly important and also hilarious. The joy of meaningless language. The comfort of swaddling oneself in empty banter. The satisfying crunch of potato chips in desert-dry mouths. They’re laughing at nearly everything, avoiding eye contact with Paul. Hunter smirks at them in the side mirror, and they smirk back, a shared secret. Paul was a drinker and an addict, maybe he knows, he probably knows, so what if he knows? But he might know. Enjoying inside jokes again. Feeling like a college student, harmlessly sneaky, losing oneself in the present, living without consequences. Feeling not at all old. Ravenous. The sensation of limitless possibility. The car still humming as they head west. Uterine warmth, heavy-headed fatigue.
THEY STOP AT THE California border so Amber and Austin can take a picture of themselves standing at the sign welcoming them to the state. Hunter stays in the car, which Paul keeps running, the air conditioner roaring. The effects of the pot have faded and they’ve had their naps and their food, and Amber is back on her quest for closure.
Kait once told Hunter she had the perfect place for his ashes. They were talking about death, having one of those hypothetical conversations couples have about the inevitable, but it was such an abstraction that it barely qualified as a real consideration. They agreed on the do-not-resuscitate issue, the cremation issue, the no-funeral issue, and then she said what she said. About the perfect place. She never told him where it was, said it should be a surprise for him after he was dead, and even now he can’t think of where he would want his own ashes to be spread, so how could she have figured it out so quickly? He told her then that he had a place for her too, but actually he had no ideas at all, still doesn’t, probably would hold on to her forever if nobody was pushing him.
They visit several more potential ash-spreading sites—an organic farm, an outer-space-themed bowling alley shaped like a UFO, a Methodist church, some sites chosen more carefully than others. Some places choose to remain stuck in time like Wild Bill’s Wild West Outpost, while most others evolve naturally and become what they have to become because they have no choice. A building that once served as a general store for gold-rushing pioneers has been revamped as a boutique hotel. An elementary school is built adjacent to the site of a bloody battle waged between settlers and the Mohave Indians. Everywhere they go, the functions and meanings of locations have deviated from their original purpose. An old warship is now an aspirational dining restaurant. A governor’s mansion burns to the ground and is rebuilt as a nightclub. Turn-of-the-century factories, long abandoned, become luxury condos. Even the Grand Canyon, with its ancient geology, is changing constantly.
When they arrive at a lake surrounded by rental cabins, Amber takes three steps onto the property and declares, “This one isn’t right for us,” and then they continue driving.
At a rest stop, Hunter tells Austin he doesn’t really want to do this, says, “I feel bad taking over your trip,” and Austin looks over his shoulder at Amber, who is scouting out new locations on the map, and he rolls his eyes. Says, “There’s nothing you can do when she gets like this.”
“If something needs to get done, I get it done,” she says. She directs Paul to keep driving west. They are headed inexorably toward the sea.
WHILE AMBER CRAMS ANOTHER gift-shop knickknack into her bag—a coffee mug that says CALIFORNIA GIRLS HAVE ALL THE FUN—Paul says, “How about we stop screwing around and get you three some real souvenirs?” He pulls up his shirt and shows them the tattoo on his right pectoral, a pair of daisies crossed at the stem. He tells them he got it done when he and Annalisa took this trip three decades ago; he chose daisies because she had told him her name was Daisy when they started dating, and for the first six months of their relationship, he had known her only by that name.
Paul has no intention of getting a tattoo himself; he’s saving space on his other pectoral for when his wife returns. Austin wants a tattoo because it’s something to do and some of his friends have really cool ones on their biceps and on their backs. Amber says, “Tattoos are stupid, and anyway they look terrible on people when they get old.”
“If I make it to seventy,” Hunter says, “I’m probably not going to be too worried about people laughing at my tattoo.”
“God, do you ever agree with anyone on anything?” Amber says. She smiles to make it seem like she’s joking.
Austin attempts to sway her with romance logic: “We could get matching tattoos and have them forever.”
“What, so then we both look stupid?” she says. “No deal. You’re on your own, Hunter.” The tattoo parlor is a small place, a storefront business on a main street in some town they can’t find on the map. There is no room inside for the others to wait with him, no one to squeeze his hand at the first bite of the needle, no one to give him a pep talk and assure him he is doing the right thing. Amber is in the car, holding on to Kait.
Actually, Hunter has considered getting a tattoo since high school, thought it would make him seem edgy, like owning a pet python or wearing vintage Black Flag T-shirts to family functions.
The permanence of the tattoo makes it difficult to choose a design; the inking of tattoos is the most lasting commitment many people will ever make. Even marriage ends at death, but tattoos linger beyond. Based on the samples hanging around the room and the suggestion binder sitting on the table, Hunter gleans that this particular shop specializes in folkloric images—wizards, dragons, trolls. He flips through the book but knows he can’t pick something from there; a tattoo is supposed to be a deeply personal accessory that will reflect one’s values, beliefs, and sense of humor, so what does it reflect about him if he selects something from the back page of a binder full of generic choices? He briefly considers requesting a pair of family crests—Dixon and Cady—but he still hasn’t figured out what his crest would be, and he doesn’t want a reminder of that other family etched into his body forever.
In the back room, he tells the artist he wants something simple to commemorate his dead wife, and without much discussion, they begin. It hurts more than he thought it would. Like a swarm of yellow jackets. He wishes he were stronger, or fatter, or something. The needle feels so close to the bone. To cry now would weaken the gesture, would make him seem uncommitted. The buzzing ends as abruptly as it began.
Before he even leaves the chair, he regrets the unoriginality in his design. R.I.P. Kait on the inside of his right forearm, no ornamentation, no color, no flourishes on the font. Just seven letters and three periods, like a discount telegram. He’s shamed by the limits of his own imagination, the consistent failure to do anything the way it ought to be done.
He could have made literary allusions, or gotten a true artist to create a portrait of her on his back. Could have covered his entire body in tributes to her, become the Twenty-first Century Illustrated Man. Could have turned his body into a work of art and been invited to stand naked against white museum walls while people trekked across the country to see him, studying him for hours while unraveling the history of Kait Cady. He could have used his otherwise useless body to promote the story of the most remarkable person he has ever known, inspired hundreds of thousands of people to talk about her in the same way they talk about Mona Lisa and Flaming June and the Girl with the Pearl Earring. A living memorial to her. Could have disappeared into Kait and let the world filter his existence through hers, worn her like a second skin and carried her with him forever.
•••
EVEN THOUGH SHE’D NEVER shared his enthusiasm for moving, Kait had been convinced by Hunter’s presentation that they should at least visit San Francisco, to see the barking sea lions piled on top of one another at the ends of the piers, to stand on a cliffside while the fog rolled over them and they disappeared momentarily from the world, to take a hot air balloon over the wineries in Napa. Hunter never thought they’d make it there, thought the European trips would supersede domestic tourism. And yet, with Kait in hand, he is standing on Fisherman’s Wharf, the pungent air sour with yeast. They’d hit the end of Route 66 two days ahead of schedule, and so Hunter had convinced them to head north for this final stop. Three thousand miles from home, he and Kait are watching a line of street performers entertaining people in all directions. There are musicians and dancers and mannequin people and magicians and washed-up hippies with funny panhandling signs.
On the walk toward the cable cars, they pass a group clustered around a street magician. The magician guesses that the dupe’s card is the ace of spades, but he is wrong—the dupe is actually holding the king of hearts. Still, the crowd expectantly leans in toward him as if this is all part of the setup, an intentional incorrect guess as prelude to an even greater trick. The magician shuffles his deck and announces, “My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. I have failed you all.” Staring down into his top hat as if searching for answers, he walks away from the dumbfounded audience, never turns back to look at them.
Hunter and the others are here to ride the cable cars and to take photos of Lombard Street, carved into the hill like a regrettable tattoo. They’ve already been through the Haight, a necessary pilgrimage for any pot smoker or classic rock fan or white kid who went to a liberal arts college and at one point identified vaguely with the freewheeling countercultural spirit of the place. It was maybe the most depressing stop on a trip full of them, a dismal hippie haven overrun with people trying too hard to re-create a moment they barely remember.
After the cable cars take them up some hills and back down again—Austin leaning out the door and high-fiving pedestriansthey continue west. The drive to the coast is easy; the beach doesn’t seem like big business here, especially not compared to the New Jersey beaches, which at this time of year would be congested and overwhelming. They park at the foot of the beach and walk on the sand, shoes in hand, jeans rolled up and cuffed. Wind whips Amber’s hair into a cyclone above her head. The sun is visible through the fog, dull and distant, not so much setting as drifting away.
He and Kait never watched a sunrise together. Nor a sunset. She wanted to, of course she wanted to, because that’s what lovers do: they watch the sun rise and fall together, symbolic, a validating moment for a relationship. He wanted to do it too, but always overslept, talked her out of it, distracted her. Found reasons to put it off. Said they should save it for later, for a special day, took too long to realize that special days cannot be predetermined but can only be remembered after they have occurred. Is finally realizing that later is a time that does not necessarily exist.
Austin and Amber stroll down the beach hand in hand, Austin sometimes bending to pick up loose shells and skim them across the water’s surface. Hunter sinks down into a hump of sand, sets Kait beside him, and pulls his knees up against his chest. The waves roll in steadily, one on top of the other. Paul approaches Hunter from behind, says, “Amber’s a good kid, but she don’t know anything.” Paul twists a coffee stirrer between his teeth, sits to Kait’s right. He digs his feet into the sand, buries himself up to his shins. “Closure.” He makes a sound like a whale spurting from its blowhole. Tosses his coffee stirrer toward the water.
Hunter thinks right now is the exact time when it would be convenient to be a drinker, because they could fill the silences by passing a bottle back and forth, let the burning in their chests do all the talking. “How long did it take you to get back to normal?” Hunter says.
Paul stretches back, leans on his elbows. “No such thing as normal.” Waves crash in harder, eating away at the shore. Out toward the horizon, the water looks nearly black. “After a while, you just keep on living. You don’t have a choice.”
Windblown sand piles up along Kait’s left side, nearly obscuring her name. A boat edges out toward the line of the horizon, and Hunter contemplates the terrifying leap of faith people made centuries ago when they piloted themselves toward what appeared to be the planet’s shelf. Completely ensconced in darkness, surrounded by sea monsters, they still pushed into the unforgiving night because they wanted to see what would happen when they reached the other side. They trusted that it would be worth the danger, and they took comfort in the rhythms of nature, knowing that the sun would absolutely rise in the morning at the right time and place and set in the evening at the right time and place, and the stars and the moon would absolutely be there to guide them. They knew better than anybody that the world would go on regardless and they had to learn to trust it or it would destroy them.
Austin and Amber reappear in the distance, headed back toward them, Amber tiptoeing between broken shells. Paul pushes himself back to his feet and says, “You got to do something with those ashes. Get her off your case.” A trip that began as an attempt for Paul to relive the happiest days of his marriage has been hijacked by Hunter and Kait’s ashes. The three of them have been preparing for this trip for months, if not years, but Hunter’s status as recent widower overshadowed their carefully considered plans. He became a burden to them, even to smiling, persistent Amber, whose helpfulness manifests itself in pushiness and a pathological need to be acknowledged as helpful, which has made Hunter feel guilty for not having made himself available enough to have been helped. And, frankly, Hunter’s trip has also been hijacked by this quest; even the way Amber has begun talking, like she and Kait are old friends and like she somehow relates to Kait, is a hijacking of Hunter’s memory; it is Amber glomming onto his heartache because it seems romantic in some way. Both parties latched on to each other and used the other: they to add meaning and depth to their trip, and he to alleviate his loneliness, yes, but also to excuse himself from having to make choices.
As Paul walks toward the ocean to dip his toes in the water, Hunter turns away, digs his phone out of his pocket and extends his tattooed arm out in front of himself to take a picture—Hunter and Kait, sitting together with the Pacific at their backs. The other side of the world as he knows it. Thinks about uploading it so he can caption it from sea to shining sea, but decides not to share it with anyone. Paul wanders off in the other direction, and Hunter pivots to look again at the ocean. Lines of whitecaps roll toward them, endless and relentless. A wave rises and swells and claws at the shore, and the mist from the crash washes over him. He finds a seashell in the sand next to him and lifts it to his ear. Twenty-five years ago, when he and Jack were walking together along a New Jersey beach, Jack knelt down and pressed a shell first against his own ear and then against Hunter’s. “I’ll tell you something your grandfather taught me when I was your age,” Jack said. “Not every shell is the same. If you find the right one, it doesn’t sound like the ocean at all.” He listened to another one, tossed it away. “Some shells have magic in them. If you listen really closely, you can hear voices from another world.” He tried another. “They’re hard to find, though. Unless you know what to look for,” Jack said, winking at Hunter to let him know that this was to be their secret. They tried a couple dozen shells that day until Jack found one that he said was filled with his own father’s voice, but when Hunter listened, he only heard the white noise of the ocean. Now, sitting alone with the ashes, Hunter knows that somewhere on this beach, there is a shell containing the message he’s been looking for. The first shell does not work and neither does the second, but in the third one he hears a sound like a whisper. He closes his eyes and concentrates so he can hear it more clearly. The whisper he hears is Kait’s voice. The journey is over, it says. When he opens his eyes he sees the waves still charging toward him, and in each wave’s crest he sees Kait rising up out of the sea and then diving back down. In the mist he feels her touch covering him completely; in every cloud he sees the outline of her body; in each grain of sand he sees her face; in the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere, he feels her physical presence with him in a way he hasn’t since he drove away from home. Nobody in the world can see it, but she is sitting next to him and her arm is draped over his shoulder and she is saying in his ear: I was real and you were real and that’s all you can ask for. And she is saying: You kept your promise. And she is saying: It’s over, it’s over, it is over.
The sound of the shell cuts out abruptly. He shakes it but it will never channel those sounds again. He stuffs it in his pocket, one of the few souvenirs he will take home with him. Then he snaps the cube open and turns it upside down to release her. He watches the ashes ride on the wind out across the beach and into the ocean and he knows they will travel across the globe on their own now. Austin and Amber, still by the water’s edge, are closing in. As he walks away from the beach, he quietly says goodbye, because he is never coming back to this place and he is never going to see these people again.