Kiss the Morning Star (13 page)

I pick up my phone.
God makes people do irrational things
, I type.

I set the phone down and pick up Kat’s copy of
The Dharma Bums
, thumbing through it and letting the words wash over me. My first response to this book has been to roll my eyes and dismiss it—it seems so frustratingly zen, trying to make things clear by means of complications—but I admit it’s growing on me. For a moment I wonder what Seth would think of it. I imagine him listening like Katy does while I read it out loud, but it feels like a betrayal. I push away the thought of his springy blond curls and magnetic smile.
The two of us.
So much simpler this way.

My cell phone chirps, and I check the screen.
So does love,
he says.

Kat opens the driver’s side door and tosses me a chocolate bar. “Success!” she says, leaning in over the door. “Ready to go?”

I nod.
So does loss,
I text back.

Kat plugs in the music. “This song, this is my driving fast song,” she says, pulling out of the lot. “So. What are we driving toward?” Her tone is brisk, uncharacteristically inaccessible. I feel a little hollow inside.

“I think I’d like to find someplace we can hunker down, stay in one place for a while, after all that craziness.” I take out the map, unfolding it awkwardly in the confines of the passenger seat.

“What about our list?”

“List?”

“Yeah, our finding God’s Love list. I mean, we can check off church and old people, right? Done and done.” Kat laughs.

I dig out my journal and open to our list. “I’ll add the shaman to the list. Or does that fall under music?” The map crumples across my lap.

“Sure, add the shaman. So what’s left? Art? Nature?”

I nod, my eyes slipping over the remaining items. “And…some other things.” I blush. “I mean, like, meditation.” I turn my attention to the map.

“You got a plan?”

“We’re right here. Let’s go this way to Yellowstone. We’ll find a little twin pine and learn to meditate. Then, when we’re ready to move again, we’ll go backpacking, deep in the woods.” I smile at Kat’s pained expression. “Oh, you’ll see, Katy Kat. It will be lovely.”

“You’re the boss, Anna babe. Give me some directions.”

“Okay, left turn up ahead.” I point; the plan spools off bravely into the future.

“I think Yellowstone will be my exhibition opening,” says Kat, pulling out onto the highway.

“Exhibition of what?”

“Of my artwork. I have a project in the works. I’m calling it
Good Lock.
”

I laugh, surprised. “What? Kat, you haven’t mentioned a word about this!” Kat raises her eyebrows, bouncing them off the dark fringe of her hair, and then smiles lopsidedly. “You haven’t asked.”

“Well, I’m asking now. What is this exhibition?”

Kat shrugs. “The little keys I’ve been drawing. I’m going to put them in places they will be discovered someday. Their discovery will cause an impact, give their discoverers a little bump at that random moment in their life. A little impact—that’s my exhibition.
Good Lock
.”

“But how is that an exhibition? It doesn’t display your art; you never even know what happens to it. What if it just blows away in the wind?”

Kat shifts gears and settles back into her seat for the drive. “Exactly,” she says. “But whatever. I open in Yellowstone.”

Our new apartment was on the other side of the railroad tracks in a dilapidated old building stained red with the taconite dust that blows off the trains passing by. Every day when I walked home from school, I crossed a footbridge high above the tracks and looked down on a row of cherry trees. In some ways, my mother was right; a tree does look the same from the top as it does from the bottom: same branches, starting as weighty limbs and narrowing to the tiniest twigs; same leaves, quivering in the slightest breeze or in the rush of the trains; same colors, same rustling, same gentle sway. But from the earth, looking up, a tree is hopeful; it might be touching the sky. From above, looking down, you can see—it’s stuck in the dust, just like us.

“This isn’t what I wanted.” I stretch out full length on the picnic table and close my notebook with a sigh. The impatience, the restless boredom in my voice annoys me. I scowl at the skinny lodgepole pines and wish I could pinpoint the source of my irritable mood.

“What do you mean?” Katy looks up from her sketchbook. Is she drawing more keys? So far Kat has “displayed” many of her creations—tiny ornate skeleton keys—in a variety of places. All of them are hidden where she hopes someone will discover what she calls, “The Impact of Good Lock on an Otherwise Ordinary Moment.”

“I mean…it’s pretty and stuff, and I think I’ve started to get the hang of meditating, but…” I close my eyes against the brightness. “It doesn’t seem like this is what I’m looking for, not yet.” The trees rising up all around us are spindly and gawky—a forest of awkward adolescents recovering from a fire, like me. I feel myself drifting, remembering the time when I was a kid and I climbed that old cedar tree and freaked my mom out. The girl who dared. Where did she go?

Kat doesn’t look away from her drawing, but she nods. “Maybe I’m ready to go backpacking.”

I sit up, my eyes blinking away the sky. “Really?” I pull the road atlas out from the bottom of the small pile of books on the table, books I’ve been trying to occupy my mind with all afternoon. “What if we headed straight up to Glacier? We could set up a base camp, do a couple hikes, maybe one backpacking trip, and wait for the festival. For the boys.”

“There are grizzly bears up there,” says Kat. She frowns at the map.

“It’s a rucksack revolution, Katy.” I grin at her. “You started it.” I want to feel what it’s like to carry everything we need on our backs, to sit against a pine tree in the middle of absolutely nowhere and just become a dot of nothing in the universe.

Kat taps the end of her pencil against her bottom lip.

“What are you working on?”

She holds up her sketchbook, shrugging.

“It’s me!”

“Maybe,” she says. “It’s a girl, anyway.” The girl is stretched out along the edge of a sunny rock, her hands palm down against the rock like she is bracing herself for something. Her eyes are closed. Her hair falls over the cliff, billowing up around her face. Far below her, a suggestion of water—an ocean in the distance.

“It’s totally me.” I reach for the paper. “I want to crawl right into this picture and stretch out like she is, in the sun.”

Kat stares at me for a long moment, and then looks away, but not before I catch the flicker of sadness in her eyes. “Can I have it back?” she says, and I hand it over. She closes the sketchbook.

“Katy, what’s wrong?” There’s something about her face that scares me.

“It’s fine.” Her voice is dark, sulky. She gathers up her pencils and packs them away in her satchel.

“I…did I say something?” I’ve upset her somehow.

Kat shakes her head, but she won’t look at me. “So are you going to show me what you were writing, then? Fair is fair.” She lifts an eyebrow at me but then quickly sticks those silly sunglasses over her dark eyes.

“Katy, I…” I grip my notebook tightly. There is a long silence between us.

“Anna?” She pulls her bag closer to her and stares at the table.

“Yeah?”

“Can you pretend you didn’t see that drawing?”

I shrug. “Okay. Why?”

“I can’t explain.” She pulls off her oversize sunglasses and fiddles nervously with the bright orange bows. “You’re right; it’s you in the sketch. But I kind of wish…I kind of wish it wasn’t.” She raises her eyes from the glasses to meet mine, the irises so dark in the shadow that they seem to blend into the black pupils. “Please, forget about it, okay?”

“I don’t get it. It’s a beautiful picture, and I totally love it.”

Kat nods. “Me, too. But I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

We spend the next three days holed up in a cute little Montana campground about halfway between East and West Glacier, and I can tell that this is the wilderness I am seeking. There are some small trails through the woods, and we do a few practice hikes to get used to wearing the big packs that I bought before we left.

In the meadows, tall, creamy flowers bloom on thick heavy stalks. Bear grass, says Melvin, our eccentric campground host. It’s easily as tall as my waist, sometimes taller. Melvin says we’ll need to fight through it, that it grows so thick it obscures the trail. It has a sweet, fresh smell in the sun.

Tonight we leave the packs behind, tramping happily through the woods just as the sun sinks low enough to send long golden beams of light through the soft green filter of the forest canopy. I pick up a long stick as I walk, enjoying the feel of the sturdy branch in my hand.

“I think I’m actually happy,” I say, wielding the stick like a sword. I spin in the trail to face Kat, who raises her own walking stick to meet mine.

“A duel to the death?” Kat says, giggling.

I laugh, too, and we spar for a moment playfully until Kat gently presses the tip of her stick into my chest. “On your knees and beg for mercy.”

Oh, god. This feels silly and dangerous at the same time. I kneel. I look up at Kat, beautiful and fierce standing there with the setting sun in her hair and her face so stern. Only her eyes are full of mirth. I stare.

“Close your eyes, prisoner.”

I giggle stupidly, my heart leaping against the point of her stick.

“Close your eyes. And
stop
laughing.”

I try to obey, shaking a little.

Katy moves her makeshift lance to my neck, pressing gently. “Close ’em.”

I close my eyes, serious at last. There is a long silence, and I feel genuinely vulnerable for a moment, as though Kat really does have a sword to my neck. Then I feel the stick come down and gently touch each of my shoulders.

“I…dub…thee…mine,” says Kat softly. “Sealed with a kiss.” The stick falls to the forest floor behind her. She kneels down in front of me and touches my face with both hands. It’s all I can do to stay here, to be here, to hold still.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but I can feel Kat’s breath lightly playing on my neck, just below my right ear, and a shudder runs through me. I can’t do this. I want this. I want her. Heat. Breath. I gasp at the touch of Kat’s mouth on my earlobe, warm kisses trailing down along my throat.

“Oh,” I say. “
Oh
.” Kat’s lips find mine, and I can no longer think; everything is a blurry sea of tongues and hands, breath and skin. I press myself closer to her, marveling at the power of the longing I feel, a force almost palpable.

“Anna…” Kat’s breath flutters in my ear, small bird wings.

I pull away. Take a deep, shuddery breath. Touch my fingers to my lips. I can hear her breathing, but neither of us says anything. I open my eyes to find Kat looking at me.

“Hi,” she whispers, still out of breath.

“Hi.”

I shrug, feeling shy. “Um, wow.”

“Are you okay…with this?” says Kat. Her hand on my arm.

I don’t know. I shake my head, shrug, nod. “I don’t know,” I say, and I let myself lean in again, finding her mouth. This time I keep a part of myself back, a part to tell me when to stop.

Her hand curls around the back of my neck, fingers twining through my hair.

I’m losing myself again, like I’m a ball of yarn; I can feel myself tangling up in her. It’s a tempting feeling—playful but panicky. I’m no good at knots. “I…I can’t….”

“I know,” whispers Kat. “It’s okay.”

I look into her eyes. “I
want
to.”

“I know. I’m not…ready yet, either.”

I nod. “I want to, though.”

“Me, too.” Kat laughs and picks at the bark of the stick that now lies discarded on the trail.

I scoot closer. “So…” I can’t say it.

“What?” Kat doesn’t look up.

I squirm. “So are we like…”

“Girlfriends?”

“Lesbians?” I don’t know why this is a whisper word. I can handle being gay, but like…I’m not crazy about a label that instantly makes people think about my sex life.

Kat shrugs. “It doesn’t seem to be a big deal to me that you’re a girl, I guess. I just…like
you
best.”

Relief. Leave it to Kat to say just the right thing. I nod. “Me, too.”

As we turn to hike back to our camp, Kat tucks one of her good lock keys into the branches of a little shrub near the spot, and even though it breaks the rules of leaving no trace, I can’t help but smile at the thought of its discovery.

Preparing for our very first backpacking trip takes the better part of a day; I feel almost back in control with my clipboard and my checklists, standing on the bench of the picnic table surveying the gear we have spread about the camp. “I couldn’t see spending the money on a water purifier when we can just boil water.” I frown at the two stoves. “Unfortunately that means carrying more fuel.”

“You can put it in my pack,” says Kat.

“And I’m not entirely sure that our sleeping bags are going to be warm enough without all of our other blankets.”

“Well, we can snuggle together for warmth.” Kat winks, and I, of course, feel my face get hot. This whole thing—whatever it is between us—has changed the way we sleep together. We’ve shared a bed at countless sleepovers since we were twelve, but lately the distance between us has become somehow precarious. Locked in our separate bags, we sleep in little cocoons of steamy breath and unwritten rules.

“What else, what am I forgetting?” I run my eyes up and down the list, but I can’t identify what’s escaping me.

“Let’s go get our backcountry permit.” Kat scratches a mosquito bite on the inside of her wrist. “Look where the little fucker got me. Itches like mad.” She holds up her swollen arm. Since reaching Glacier, Kat has discovered that she has an allergic reaction to mosquito bites; they swell up into quarter-sized lumps. “It’s hard to be all zen and shit when you want to claw all the skin off your arm.”

Kat isn’t much interested in Kerouac-style meditation. She can’t see any value in sitting still and doing nothing for so long when she can get herself to that empty state a lot faster through her painting.

As for me, I’ve been sort of meditating in the mornings and evenings since we got to Devil’s Creek. The first day I tried to just sit still and think nothing, to let my mind go empty, but the more I tried to stop thinking, the more thoughts I had.

Now I’m trying something different; I repeat the first line of the prayer my mother cross-stitched and hung on the wall. “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” I sent my dad a text about this almost-prayer.
I pray each morning in the woods, but it’s Mom I’m talking to.
His answer came back with record speed.
I’m certain your prayers make her sing.

I breathe slowly, trying to picture the words dropping down into the deep well inside me, trying to imagine my mother singing. Hoping my father will sing again, too.

“I guess it’s as good a time as any,” I say, referring to the permits. “Maybe we can get some dinner in East Glacier?”

We pack up and head to the main ranger station, where we fill out the paperwork, and a ranger makes us watch a short video about grizzly bears. It’s pretty intense. We buy some little bells to hang from our packs and a couple of bigger bells to carry. Learning about the bears reminds me of the time I had my wisdom teeth out, how my mom and I had to sign all these forms that basically said we understood that I might not ever wake up from the procedure. We joked about it, but we signed our names, one beside the other, her loopy
A
’s mirroring my own.

“Should we buy some of that super-powered pepper spray?” says Kat.

I startle, realizing I’ve been lost in my head. “Um, it seems like that would piss them off. Maybe we should just try to be calm and stuff?”

Kat laughs, glancing over her shoulder as she folds a Good Lock card into a guidebook about wildflowers and replaces the book on the shelf. “Okay, Anna babe, but I’m not sure I’m going to be thinking super rationally when I’m staring down a thousand pounds of steaming, rancid-smelling bear. You know?”

She puts her arm around my waist, drawing me close as we stand in front of an interpretive display about the grizzly bear. She slips her fingers beneath the waistband of my jeans, sliding her hand over my tattoo. She leans in close and whispers, her breath heavy in my ear. “Danger can be exciting,” she says.

“Katy, stop,” I say, pulling away. I look around, embarrassed. My knees are wobbling.

“I’ll stop,” says Kat, grinning. “For
now.
”

And suddenly I forget everything I’ve learned about bears.

Driving out of the park on the Two Medicine Road, just after crossing the boundary into the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, I see a sign advertising two-dollar showers. “Katy, pull over!” We haven’t had a shower since the Shepherds’ home, haven’t even cleaned up with running water since the sponge bath at the church, after I was sick. For the past week, we’ve been taking “baths” with a tub of baby wipes inside the tent. The thought of hot, steamy water and clean hair is pure bliss.

Kat turns the car down a winding road, following signs to a quiet campground tucked against the banks of Two Medicine Creek, where we purchase two showers and two candy bars. We stand outside in the dusty parking lot, holding our towels and the key to a small wooden door marked G
ALS
.