There Will Be Lies (8 page)

The crying is worse now. Not louder, but more insistent. I am 100 per cent freaked out, and now I only 50 per cent know this is a dream. The room I have stepped into is too solid, too detailed, to be imaginary. I’m in a square waiting room open at the other end, where there is a corridor that leads – I know – to another waiting room, and branching off that are the examination rooms.

There are plastic chairs set out in the first waiting room, but they’re empty. To my right is a wooden kitchen, for young kids to play with. I walk past it. There’s a low table with Legos on it. Another with magazines for the parents, jumbled up, all of them tattered and old. I pass a poster that says

I’m at the reception desk now. There are two computers behind it, papers, phones. A bell you can ring. But I don’t ring it; no one would come. I know that because I have done it before.

Opposite the reception desk, on the other wall of the corridor, is an old rocking horse, its paint faded and peeled. It’s enormous – like a horse from a fairground ride. It must be a hundred years old. The mane looks like it’s made from real horse hair. Next to it is a plaque.

All this time the child is crying, I can feel it in my bones. I am drawn towards it, irresistibly. I want to touch the horse, touch its hair, the worn smoothness of its saddle, but I can’t.

I have to follow the crying. It’s filling me now, it’s not so much in my ears as in my head. The terror, the need. The loneliness.

The corridor is short, and there’s no door at the end – it just opens into the second waiting room, with the doors along its walls, where the doctors see people. I don’t know how I know what’s behind the doors, but I do. I move quickly – the child is in the second waiting room, waiting for me, crying for me.

The child is always in the second waiting room.

I reach the open doorway. There are the doctors’ doors. And to my right, another corridor, leading deeper into the hospital. An arrow is on the wall, and next to it, in green, restroom signs – a man and a woman in simple silhouette, the woman known by her triangle dress. Below it is a low shelf with picture books on it.

More plastic chairs.

And sitting in the middle of the floor, next to a play mat with grey roads and green fields, is the child.

It’s a little girl, she’s a little girl, maybe two years old. She is cross-legged on the floor, wearing a dress with birds on it, and her head is tilted up and she’s crying, crying, crying. Her chubby arms are wrapped around herself, her hair is tied back in a tiny ponytail. In one of her hands is a stuffed grey bunny, at least I think it’s a bunny, I’m not exactly sure because it’s pressed into her body, but I see the long ears. Her whole body is shaking with her fear and her need.

I move quickly to the centre of the room, and she looks up and sees me, and just for one moment her big brown eyes look into mine and she stops crying – breath hitching in her chest, as if catching on something – and then she starts again, even louder than before, reaching her hands out for me to pick her up. I can see now that it definitely is a bunny she’s holding. Soft, plush fur, worn and shiny as if it’s been washed lots of times.

I bend down, put my hands under her arms, I’m about to feel the weight of her, to hoist her into the air and hold her tight against me, to stroke her hair and tells her it’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK, to –

And then I wake up, with a start; I’m all twisted up in my sleeping bag, drenched in sweat.

Mom sits up next to me. She turns on a flashlight.
What’s wrong, honey?
she says.

Nothing
.

You’re crying, Shelby
.

Just a bad dream
, I say.

The little girl?
she says.

Yes
.

She puts her arm around me.
Tomorrow is a new day
, she says.

I lean into her.
I’m scared, Mom
, I say.

I know
.

Is Dad … I mean … He really wants to kill us?

She sighs.
He’s a very bad man
, she says.
But I’ll keep us safe. I promise you, I’ll keep us safe
.

I close my eyes and we stay like that for a moment, in the flickering light of the flashlight, in the back of the rental car. I feel OK, the amped-up emotion of the dream is fading, the painful urge to comfort that child, to stop her crying, and I’m in the car with Mom, I can feel the warmth of her – it’s hard to imagine some guy, some father I never knew, turning up and breaking into this picture.

Still.

Still, it’s a promise she can’t keep, her promise to protect me, and part of me already knows it.

The next morning, Luke cooks eggs. Then we get into his car. He actually watches me fastening my seat belt, making sure. He starts talking to Mom about side impact or something but I’m not really paying attention.

We pull out from the little campsite, leaving our rental car behind, and follow the road down from the forest to the desert plateau. I take shotgun, and Mom rides in the back.

I coulda worked around here
, says Luke as we drive, sort of to himself. He’s looking around at the trees, the rocks.
Nice and cold. Hell, where I was in El Paso, every other day in summer we were breaking down a door to find an old lady who’d cooked herself, ’cause she was scared to go outside, with all the dealers on the corners
. He turns to me.
They can’t afford air-conditioning
, he adds, as if this needs explaining.

I say nothing. I can see sweat beading on Luke’s forehead, and it’s got to be only forty degrees. His dead eye is focused on the sky, or a squashed bug on the windshield. I love being in Luke’s car. I love how my life has got so weird lately and now I’m riding shotgun in a weird old half-blind guy’s car. It’s THE BOMB.

I can tell Mom isn’t too happy either, no matter how good an
actress she turns out to be – the dead old women stuff has freaked her out too, and she’s fidgeting, I can feel her feet rubbing against the back of my seat.

Here they’ve got the hikers, I guess
, he says.
Mountain bikers. But what’s that? Broken legs? And no smell. Really, the smell, with those old women … Yeah. A couple of skiers and climbers, just extreme-sport dumbasses stupid enough to break their own limbs? I could have dealt with that
.

Then he swallows.

I
…
ah … I mean, present company excepted
, he says.
From the whole dumbass thing, you know
.

I look down at my leg and remember I was supposed to have broken it climbing. Crap, I’m going to have to speak. This is going to be the first time I’ve spoken to him. I can feel Mom’s nerves behind me, like there’s an electrical storm suddenly brewing in the car; clouds gathering, sparking.

I lick my lips.

That’s fine
, I say.

She speaks!
says Luke, and it’s totally cool, he’s laughing, and then Mom’s laughing. The storm breaks, and in the car the sun bursts through clouds. The relief is enormous, like someone was standing on my chest that whole time, and I only half knew it, and now they have stepped off.

Luke turns off when we get to the sign that says AGUA FRIA NATIONAL MONUMENT. We follow something called Bloody Basin Road, which seems like a bad omen to me, until we get to a parking lot.

Luke pulls up and stretches when he gets out of the car. There is literally no one else here. It’s not exactly Disneyland, of course. Grassland, with little shrubs, stretches out to the end of the world,
where mountains rise, purple against the pale blue sky. A couple of cacti prod the air with their fingers, reaching for the torn clouds. The words that come to mind are:

Vast.

Epic.

Enormity.

I’ve never been beyond the desert just outside Phoenix, I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. It’s like standing in the landscape from a story, the way it stretches to the horizon, the dreamlike quality of it. It is just unbelievably beautiful.

As I’m standing there, probably with my mouth open, a couple of deer appear on a rise just in front of us, silhouetted for a moment against the sky. Deer! For a second a bad thought goes through my head, like a twinge of neuralgia – the coyote, standing outside the car last night.

But no. I imagined that, or something.

The deer see us and spook; they spring into the air like a weapon being fired, and ghost away down the other side of the low hill. An after-image of their bodies, elegantly in flight, burns against my retinas.

Sacred animal
, says Luke.

He reaches in the back of the car and takes out a couple of bottles of water – big ones, like gallon ones. He also puts a compass in his pocket, along with his knife.

You think we’re gonna get lost?
says Mom. I’m still watching the beautiful scenery in front of me so I’m only half concentrating on their conversation.

I’ve treated people for sunstroke and [            ] who only went for a walk in the woods behind their [            ]. I don’t take chances
.

Mom:
[            ]
, giggling.

Me: barf.

Luke gestures to the path and we follow, me going slowly on my CAM Walker.

Luke stops when he sees me walking gingerly on it.
You sure you shouldn’t wait in the car?
he says.

Yeah, Shelby
, says Mom.
Maybe you
–

I’m fine
, I say, as loud and clearly as I can.

We’re on a little plateau within the larger plateau, next to a miniature canyon that opens on a tiny creek that runs silvery below us. We come to some ruins – little low stone walls, all fallen down.

Is this Apache?
says Mom.

No
, says Luke.
It’s P–

I don’t get what he says after that but it doesn’t matter because there’s a sign, telling us not to leave the path or touch the ruins, and it says that these ruins belong to the Perry Mesa culture and date from around 1,000 CE. They predate the Apache, Yavapai or Navajo, and not much is understood about their culture.

Luke is gesturing at everything, beaming, like it’s all really exciting and not some stones.

I roll my eyes at the crappy ruins and Luke sees me.

Ah
, he says.
But it’s the [    ] that we’re really here for
.

I frown at him.

Pe-tro-glyphs
, he says.
Rock paintings. Over a thousand years old
.

I shrug.

He takes out a little guidebook and leafs through it. Then he points to the canyon over to the right.
Down there
, he says.

Down there?
says Mom. It’s pretty steep – we can see the little ribbon of the creek, all green with algae, a long way below.

There should be a path
, says Luke.

Suitable for a girl with a cast thing on her foot?

He frowns at me.
I don’t know. Let’s see
.

It turns out, though, that the path is quite smooth, and zigzags around the steepest section of cliff, taking us down into cooler and cooler shadow. It takes a while, especially with me hobbling, but then it’s not like we have anything better to do.

Down there, when we step out from the shadow of the cliff, the creek is surprisingly wide, and when I look up I see why: the cliff towers above us, the plateau gone now, and we’re locked away down here in a rocky ravine. Spiny trees grow on both sides of the lichen-green water, which runs sluggishly past us.

Luke consults the book again and then leads us along the creek, towards some other cliffs, lower, overhanging. He offers me his hand to help me over a couple of rocks, but I shake my head, and sit on them and then swing my heavy storm trooper leg around, using my butt as the fulcrum of a lever, and then limp past the fleshy leaves of a cactus. We come to the cliff face and Luke points up.

I look.

There, on the reddish wall of the rock, are little drawings scratched into the stone: deer, some kind of stag, geometric patterns.

Despite myself, I feel something resonate inside me, a plucked string. More than a thousand years ago, someone scraped these pictures into being. A man with a spear. A sun.

Luke turns to me and Mom.
This one is thought to be some kind of star map
, he reads from the book, while pointing to a circle, in which have been carved shapes like starbursts.

See how many elks there are?
he says. He gestures, and shapes I hadn’t quite discerned pop into being as I look at them, become antlered creatures, large deer.

Ah, I think. Not stags. Elks.

Elks were sacred to the Perry Mesa people, it seems like
, he goes on.
The modern-day peoples here – the Yavapai, the Apache – don’t particularly revere them. But there are so many of them on the rocks all around this area that they just have to be significant
.

He’s no longer reading from the book, and I realise suddenly that this is his thing: prehistory, or Native Americans, or whatever.

Not that I’m complaining. I mean, rock paintings are 789 times better than stories about people being cooked alive and stuff.

We spend like an hour down there, in the creek. Not in the creek, you know what I mean. The ravine. A couple of times, Mom and Luke climb up somewhere I can’t get to, looking at some pictures, but after a while they all look the same to me so I don’t mind that I can’t follow.

Finally, Luke seems to have had enough.
You want to get some lunch before we head back to camp?
he says.
I figure I’ll stay there tonight again if you are. Mexico can wait another day
.

Sure
, says Mom.

Luke turns and starts making his way up the path, back to the plateau. Mom glances at me. Then she picks up a heavy, smooth rock. She hefts it in her hand.

What are you doing?
I say.