Gracie giggled at that.
“What did I tell you, girls?” her dad said, shaking his head with pleasure. “Didn’t I tell you it would be great? I mean, look at this! It’s like we’re the first explorers in the Garden of Eden or something. Look,” he said, squeezing between them and pointing across the lake toward the trees. “You can see steam from a fumarole coming out from the trees over there.”
“A what?” Danielle asked.
“A fumarole. A steam vent. There are four kinds of thermal features in the world and all of them are in Yellowstone: geysers, mudpots, hot springs and fumaroles. That’s a fumarole. So we not only have this spectacular wilderness around us, we are also in one of the world’s most active thermal areas. Jed said there were over ten thousand thermal features in the park. It’s just amazing.” As he talked, he reached out and pulled both girls in to him. He said, “And there’s nobody on earth I’d rather share this with than my two girls.” Gracie smiled and felt a tiny sting of tears in the corners of her eyes.
“I have to pee,” Danielle said. “Do you know where the bathroom is, or do we just wander off into the trees like cavewomen?”
Gracie watched her dad flush. He said, “There aren’t any bathrooms.”
“It’s just an expression, dad,” Danielle said, rolling her eyes and hopping from foot to foot. “Could you go ask them?”
Her dad made a face, but he said, “Sure,” and started off for Dakota and Jed, who were carrying stacks of rolled-up tents toward a grassy shelf that overlooked the lake. Gracie glared at her sister.
“I’m sorry,” Danielle said, her eyes flashing. “I know it was a lovely family moment, but…”
While their dad talked with Jed, Gracie surveyed the group. Walt and Justin were still rigging up to fish. James Knox, Tony D’Amato, and Drey Russell stretched out on rocks and downed logs near them, listening to Walt explain the parts of his fly rod and the line to Justin, who stood by, feigning patience. It was obvious he was ready to take the rod from his stepfather and start casting. Tristan Glode stood quietly farther down the shoreline smoking a cigar and looking out over the water as if he owned it. Donna Glode had stripped to tight bicycle shorts and a tank top and was doing some kind of yoga or exercises in the middle of a clearing in the trees where Gracie guessed the cooking stove and eating area would be set up. Although the woman was isolated from the others, Gracie had the impression Donna wanted to be watched as she stretched her long limbs and bent over so her chiseled butt was in the air.
Over on the grassy bench where their dad had walked, Rachel Mina hovered near Jed and Dakota holding her duffel bag, looking like she couldn’t wait to get into her tent when it was set up.
Gracie narrowed her eyes and swept the area a second time. K. W. Wilson was nowhere to be seen. Maybe, she thought, he didn’t need instructions from Jed and Dakota where to relieve himself.
“You’re not going to like this very much,” her dad said to Danielle as he walked back to them. Gracie could tell he was suppressing a smile.
Said Danielle, “What?”
“There’s a little portable toilet up the mountain,” he said, pointing into the trees away from the lakefront. “Dakota said the trail goes up from the eating area over there where that lady is making a spectacle of herself. It’s about a quarter mile up the mountain, Dakota said.”
“A quarter mile?” Danielle cried.
“Park Service regulations, is what they told me,” her dad said, still controlling the grin. “Anyway, Dakota said she set it up first thing so you’re the inaugural user. There’s a roll of toilet paper in a Ziploc bag near the firepit.”
Danielle nodded and started for the trees.
“One more thing,” he said, winking at Gracie so Danielle couldn’t see him. “The Park Service has a regulation about the paper. After you’re done with it you need to bring it back down and throw it in the firepit. It has to be burned so there’s no trace.”
“What?” She was outraged. “I have to wipe myself and bring the paper back down? In my hand?”
He shrugged. “It’s the rules.”
Danielle turned to Gracie. “You’re coming with me.”
“I don’t have to go.”
Danielle narrowed her eyes. “You need to help me find it.”
“I don’t have to go.”
Her dad said, “Gracie, it would be nice if you went with her.”
“Let’s go now,” Danielle hissed.
Gracie said, “Ugh.”
“I’ll wait for you here,” their dad said. “I’ll figure out which tents we get in case you girls want to take a rest or change clothes or anything.”
It was striking, Gracie thought, how cool the temperature was in the shadows of the trees away from the lake and the clearings near the shore. She trudged along behind her sister’s long strides beneath the high canopy of the trees. They pushed their way up the hillside through knee-high ferns. At one point, Gracie turned and could see the sun-fused lake through an opening of branches and a glimpse of a yellow dome tent being set up on the grassy bench. Her dad stood near the yellow tent talking to Rachel Mina. Their conversation looked comfortable-even animated. Gracie was fascinated because she so rarely saw her father in the context of other people. Especially single women around his own age. She wondered if her dad was different with Rachel Mina. Maybe not so uptight and stiff as he was with them. And she wondered what Rachel Mina thought of him.
“Hmmm,” Gracie said.
“Come on,” Danielle said, “quit stopping.” Then: “My God-we have to have hiked a quarter of a mile so far. I wonder if we passed it?”
“We didn’t pass it,” Gracie said. “Keep going.”
“I might just drop my jeans and go right here.”
“Go ahead,” Gracie said, “I’m not stopping you.”
“Maybe a little farther,” Danielle said. “But if they think I’m carrying down the paper in my hands they’re out of their fucking minds. Jed can come up here and get it.”
“Sure, okay,” Gracie said, “let’s piss off the outfitter the very first night of the trip. That’s good thinking, Danielle.”
Her sister pushed her way through pine boughs and suddenly came to an abrupt stop before a small portable toilet with four metal legs and a square of plywood with a hole in the middle of it. A dark plastic bag hung down beneath the seat, the bottom of the bag inches from the pine-needle carpet. There were stunted pines near the apparatus, but basically it was in the open.
“Oh. My. God,” Danielle said, looking around as if trying to find the missing walls of the outhouse.
“Not a lot of privacy, is there?” Gracie said, needling her sister. “It’s like anybody could be hiding in the trees out there watching you. Or like a bear could come out of the woods and bite you on your naked white butt.
“Or ravens,” Gracie said, reveling in it, recalling when Danielle had once confessed her fear of the black birds. “Maybe ravens will fly down while you’re squatting and take a big old chunk out of your right cheek! You’ll be scarred! You’ll need surgery. You can never wear bikini bottoms again without people pointing and laughing at the girl with one ugly cheek!”
“Sometimes,” Danielle said, lowering her pants and shooting dagger eyes at her little sister while she squatted over the seat, “I could just kill you.”
Gracie turned away. It would be funnier, she thought, if she wouldn’t have to use the little toilet later.
And if she hadn’t just heard the muffled crack of a branch from someone coming up the trail toward them.