Physical strength had never been high on Anna’s priority list. Her work had demanded the ability to organize and focus. A stage manager’s greatest asset was the gift of paying attention at all times and to all things so none of the thousands of threads that must be woven together to create the director’s vision was lost, late, or broken.
Zachary, her husband, tall as he was, was not a strong man. He was willowy, slender, and supple, with long fingers that could speak as eloquently as most men’s tongues.
Smiling, Anna remembered a crew member asking Zach to pick up the other end of a massive oak refectory table that needed moving. Zach had been unable to so much as disturb the wood. Sweeping a gracious bow to the other man, he had said, “Alas, all I have to offer is my civility.”
A day spent fetching tools and carrying buckets and the case containing Jenny’s water-sampling paraphernalia had worn Anna out, while Jenny remained unfazed. The ill-fated trek up to the plateau had exhausted her to the point that her muscles were quivering and she could scarcely breathe. Unearthing Kay had been a Herculean task. Carrying a fifteen-ounce skunk up a twenty-foot ladder taxed her strength. The hours she’d been lost, looking for the trail back down to Dangling Rope, she had almost given up because she was so weak and tired.
Had she been stronger, maybe the boys would not have caught her. Maybe she could have fought them off long enough to get away.
Anna resolved to eat more and get strong. Everybody died. Cars killed, microbes, viruses, cancers, plaque, bullets, knives, gravity: Death came in one form or another in the end. Death would come for Anna, she knew that. She swore when it came it would find her strong.
Never again would she go down without a fight.
THIRTY-ONE
Jenny was in excellent form. She charmed the adults, entertained the children, and left their camp feeling she had enlisted four more people in her campaign to free Lake Powell’s beaches from the rising tide of toxic waste.
As the campers headed toward their Jet Skis for an evening ride, she turned and went back toward her own campsite. Her feet felt light, her heart soared, and she laughed out loud. She was young, living in the most amazing place on earth, doing important work for reasonable remuneration, and she was in love.
The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent. That her darling little pigeon was probably woefully heterosexual, and their union might never be consummated, didn’t dampen her enthusiasm by any noteworthy amount.
“Statistically insignificant,” she called to her beloved, not caring that she got nothing but mild confusion in return. Infrequently—but nonetheless deliciously—loving pure and chaste from afar was a grand thing.
Then, too, sometimes a girl got lucky.
Flopping down on the sand next to Anna, she asked, “Is there any more wine?”
Anna handed her the red fuel bottle. This wasn’t Jenny’s cheap vin ordinaire but a twenty-seven-dollar bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle Merlot that had been reserved for a special occasion. Two more bottles of her usual waited on the boat as backup. Not to inebriate for the purpose of seduction—such acts were beneath an enchantress of Jenny’s stature—but to ensure a mellow evening.
At the moment Jenny felt anything but mellow. Had there been tall buildings, she would have leaped them, dragons, she would have slain them, if it would have enhanced the pleasure of her new mistress.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Anna said.
Would that it were a pigeon, Jenny thought wickedly and smiled. “I feel positively grand,” she said. “We’ve hours of light left. Where can I take you? What can I show you? Your wish, my command.”
“You can show me who shoved me into the jar,” Anna said flatly.
With that jab of reality, Jenny’s elation deflated somewhat. “Ugly thoughts for such a beautiful evening,” she said gently.
“I know. Sorry,” Anna apologized. “My solution hole isn’t all that far from here, is it? Not as the frog hops?”
Anna must have been looking at maps. A week ago Jenny would have bet she neither knew nor cared about the geography of the lake and its environs.
“The end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road is maybe a quarter of a mile from the head of this canyon,” Jenny told her. In saying the words she realized not only was that true but— “Those college kids,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight. “They didn’t have to come up from the Rope or down Hole-in-the-Rock from Escalante. They could have climbed out of Panther.”
Now Ms. Pigeon was interested. She looked out over the skinny lick of water that fronted the grotto. “Sheer cliffs,” Anna said. “What? Sixty, eighty feet up to the plateau? They would have had to be bitten by a radioactive spider to pull that off.”
“Come with me,” Jenny said, delighted she had found a gift for her new friend. “Be prepared to strip to your underwear—or skin, if you prefer the classics.”
Watching how stiffly Anna got to her feet, Jenny felt a pang of remorse. The poor little thing had seemed determined to do the work of ten men regardless of the fact her shoulder hadn’t fully healed and she should have been on bed rest after the trauma she’d suffered.
“We don’t have to go,” Jenny said earnestly. “I was just going to show you the slot canyon that forms the end of Panther. It’s been there since Zeus was in knee pants. It will still be there tomorrow. You should rest. Let me fix you some dinner.”
“No,” Anna replied, evidently determined to push herself until she dropped in her tracks. “I want to see it. I like the idea they could have come up from here. It makes more sense than the road or the trail. Show me how.”
Jenny looked at her for a second, watching her gather her little strength around her great heart, and silently mocked herself for describing it as such. Despite the mockery she was so proud of Anna tears stung her eyes.
“I am so very completely and totally an idiot,” she said softly.
Anna had ducked into the tent to get her boating shoes. If she heard Jenny’s brief autobiography she gave no sign.
Beyond the grotto, the long skinny finger of lake snaking its way along the bottom of Panther Canyon narrowed precipitously. The gunwales of Jenny’s boat were scarcely a foot from the eighty-foot-high cliffs forming the sides of the slot canyon. Running at idle, she nosed the boat forward until both sides of the Almar’s bow touched the sandstone, then scraped, then the boat stuck like a cork in a bottle. Having shut down the engines, Jenny joined Anna where she knelt on the bow looking, to Jenny’s eye, like one of Arthur Rackham’s fairies.
Three feet from where the bow was wedged, giant stone steps, with an almost man-made symmetry, rose thirty feet above the lake level. Like a calving glacier, great rectangles of rock had sheared from the sides of the slot and fallen in a neat pile, completely blocking the canyon. To either side of the giant’s staircase another sixty feet of cliff cut upward before the earth gave way to the ribbon of sky. With the sun gone from them, and the sky turning pearl, the rock appeared dove gray and soft as velvet. The water ran dark, a blue that is only the blink of an eye from black.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” she asked when Anna didn’t speak.
Anna was shaking her head. The end of her long braid twitched across the back of Jenny’s hand. She stifled the urge to catch it as she might a cat’s tail.
“It’s too steep. It’s too high. Nobody could get out.” Anna’s voice, usually an alto, smooth as warm honey, had risen an octave and was all sharps and flats. Her eyes were too wide. Around the dark hazel irises Jenny could see white.