But she had never shunned her mother either. Argued with her, yes, constantly through her twenties and beyond. But she hadn’t completely cut off contact with her. Her mother always had her phone number, knew where she was living. Hoa said, “We don’t even know if Declan’s safe. If I only knew that.” Her eyes glassed over. “I have to know that.”
Their son had returned to college after his release from the hospital only to drop out toward the end of his last semester. They didn’t find out he was gone until they went up for graduation. They spoke to two of his teachers, one of whom said that their son was an unusually gifted young man. Argumentative, anti-authoritarian, serious, those words came up in every conversation. The professors had no idea where he’d gone. Neither did his former roommates, or they wouldn’t say.
For months afterward, Hoa mechanically went to her studio, throwing ugly pots and smashing them back into shapeless clay. She’d come home in the late afternoons to sprawl on the couch with her books and anti-depressants. Dale would bring home prepared food from Whole Foods or the Thai place or Be-Bop Burrito, and they would eat on TV trays watching the news. In the evening, Hoa took her sleeping pills, and Dale took his anti-anxiety pill.
It took months, but gradually, Hoa began to come back to life. Wounded, yes. But she became increasingly functional. At Dale’s suggestion, she started yoga classes — hot yoga even though it was summer. Dale would come home from teaching summer school and find her rimpled green yoga mat drying out on the back of a kitchen chair, and he would hang it up in the closet and come across it, the next day, on the kitchen chair again.
Long runs through the neighborhood helped him deal in his own way with his load of helplessness and guilt — whatever he had done or failed to do, whatever had brought on his son’s anger, his silence, his disappearance. Dale would wake up long before the alarm, obsessing on moments like the time when he had been digging a hole in the backyard for a little pond and Declan had come out and asked if he could help. He had told him it was really a one-man job. Why had he said that? Why the hell? And then Dale would get out of bed and drink a protein shake and dress for a run. An hour later, enveloped in the regular sound of his own heavy breathing, half-hypnotized by the mantra of his shoes whap whapping the road as he paced between tents of gauzy streetlamp light past houses in which he knew everyone was still dreaming, his head would begin to clear. That was his time of communion with the world. In the concentrated quiet, all his senses became a listening, and he, a moving prayer.
A Bad Case
Even more than water, Dale needed shade. He just needed to lie down for a while out of the sun. His insides cramped and his knees quivered now and again under him as he walked in a hop-along fashion, putting as little weight as possible on his bad ankle. Hoa marched ahead. For a while, Dale limped after her, putting one foot in front of the other along the dirt trail, each footstep expressing a thin puff of dust. His face down, he studied those puffs of dust over and over. When the sun briefly ducked behind the edge of a cloud, he felt more than saw the world change color around him and a thin hope was resurrected inside his fatigue. On his left side, scraggly cacti, acacia, and brush clamored to the edge of a deep drop. There was a flat stretch of desert below, and in the distance, rows of blue-green mountains.
He hadn’t limped very far when a high, clear whistle drew his attention to his right. He steadied himself, shading his eyes with the flat of his hand, scanning the arrays of candalaria between him and the rise a few hundred feet away. One tall, yellow wand of yucca stood up from various collaborations of brown and green. Where the hill steepened, the brush and cacti thinned out, and a sill of naked rock erupted against flat blue sky. Like a ruined castle. Dale could make out a band of quartz gleaming in the sill. The whistle repeated.
Dale didn’t see the bird, but he thought he saw a bear hunched at the base of the massed rock. Weird, like from Hoa’s dream. But it wasn’t a bear, it was a dark opening, a cave. He would have never seen it if the bird hadn’t called. It didn’t look too far away. If he could climb up there, he could wait out the sun’s assault and gather his strength. He stood on the trail like a scarecrow, dizzy, his puke-hollowed stomach vibrating, gurgling, while Hoa kept walking on. He was about ready to sit down in the trail. His tongue was like a shoe in his mouth. He tried to swallow, but could not. He wiped the sweat from his face, and his cheeks and nose stung with the grit on his fingers. He stood there, lifting the waist edge of his black T-shirt to his face, and it occurred to him that although he was dehydrated, he was still sweating profusely. His wrinkled organs were squeezing the last of their tinctures through his skin. He drew the wet back of his hand against his lips, felt the wetness but could not taste it.
Hoa was far ahead of him now. He took a moment to look around. Barren rock, desiccation, and emptiness everywhere. Just beside the trail, the brush was chest-high and thick, without a hint of an animal path or an opening. The sun buried its thorn into his skull. Dale looked back down the trail toward the car, barely visible now, less than a half mile away. Then he looked up the trail. Hoa had turned around and was coming back to him. Hoa to the rescue.
He waited for her, telling himself that he might recover himself more quickly in the cool of the cave. Remembering that miners had found a cave of giant crystals somewhere in Chihuahua. Rhomboid crystals bigger than school buses.
When she stood in front of him, he was startled by her eyes: all the different emotions there, like trees with birds shifting through them. Every muscle in her face was tense, and her plump lips had narrowed. He explained calmly that he was going to wait a few hours, rest his ankle, and then come after her. He saw her see the tears running along his nose and he wiped his temples and his stinging eyes. He said something about sweat. As he was wiping his cheek with his shirt, she put her arms around him, taking him by surprise.
While she held him, the bottom of his damp shirt caught up around his chest, she could feel his heart beating so wildly against her own that she felt joined by it and feared it might pry loose if either of them pulled away.
Dale was relieved that she agreed to go ahead without him. She’d stay on this trail and leave a sign for him if she turned at a fork. He would rest and catch up. He apologized as she kissed him quickly on his wet cheek. Hoa turned unsentimentally, but Dale put his hands on her shoulders, massaging her shoulders and neck while she stood waiting to be released into pure uncertainty. He worked his thumb down along her inner shoulder blade and heard that wonky ligament pop. Stepping in place like a toy soldier, Hoa said, “I’ll see you soon,” and she walked forward without turning her head, saying nothing more. Dale could see those hamstring muscles rounded against the back of her pants.
He watched her go, thinking she would look back but she didn’t. Then he stared up at the cave. It was pure chance that he’d seen it. If they’d been driving, the cave mouth would have been imperceptible. Dale took a breath and projected a trajectory, glancing from the cave to Hoa to the cave. Then he plunged between two bushes, feeling the sharp branches scrape his arms and hearing them scratch loudly at his cargo pants. He was out of breath right away, slipping, almost fainting, losing any view as he stepped over dead palo verde branches, sidestepped cacti, and slowly worked his way around boulders. Because he had to concentrate on each step, he stopped every fifteen feet or so to look up toward the cave, to breathe deeply, and to take stock of his position. Instead of climbing directly, he had angled around to the right, where the candalaria and dwarf juniper — with its bark like alligator skin — was lower and less dense. The resinous scent of creosote rose as he forced his way through a phalanx of face-high shrubs, and the exertion actually seemed to reawaken his senses. That was a good sign. He could still smell. Under his boots, the loose talus clattered, and he lost his balance repeatedly, dropping down to one knee but not falling.