Picture Us In The Light(97)

We stopped really talking thirty or forty minutes ago, not in a way that felt like things were done but more that we were leaving them suspended, balancing carefully above us so we’d tiptoe under their shadows without upending anything. Since then we’ve been mostly quiet.

And I still haven’t said anything to him. What would happen if I just never do? I’ll regret it forever, I know that. My life will radiate out and out from this moment and I’ll always wish I could have it back to do over.

But then won’t I feel that, too, if I tell him and it ruins everything?

We pass into the city limits. I take a deep breath and hold out my arms a little from my sides to see if I can feel anything different. Do my atoms know I’m here, this close to her? Could you measure something different in me? I let them back down.

“For whatever it’s worth,” Harry says, “I think it’s a good thing you’re doing.”

“That doesn’t always mean a good outcome, though.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s the part about the world I never know how to live with. But it’s not nothing, either.”

We drive through town—it takes all of sixty seconds, old buildings with flat facades that remind me of the Gold Rush and squarish brick buildings mashed against the kind of newer building that masquerades as older, hastily built—and keep going out past town on a dirt road into the grasslands. I can barely swallow. But I try to watch everything carefully, not just for directions but also because this is the life my sister inhabits, because I want to collect all the texture and details.

It’s seven or eight miles on the back roads, but it feels like longer because you can’t go very fast. The grass is taller out here, in some stretches nearly as tall as the car, and it makes it look like the mountains behind it could be anywhere from five to five hundred miles away. There’s a layer of dust building on the windshield. We don’t pass a single other car, and more than once Harry says, “You’re sure this is right?”

“I’m pretty sure. The map looks right.” Besides that, I’m starting to feel it—some tingling in my limbs that means we’re getting closer, something that brings me back to what it felt like in my dad’s lab that morning all those years ago. And then we go up over a crest and then we see it in the clearing down below: the field station. Where my sister is.

The field station is two portables situated in a T. There are some trucks parked kind of haphazardly in front. All around is high yellow grass and occasionally trees, and it stretches about as far as you can see. Thirty or forty yards from the far portable is what I’m pretty sure from the map is the Pit River cutting through the grass, a wooden footbridge going across it.

The heat outside seeps into the car as soon as Harry cuts the engine. I drink some of the water we got at the gas station. When we get out my legs feel heavy after sitting so long, and the dried grass is brittle under our feet. It’s hot out here, and so quiet—no cars, no planes, no city noises. The sun has an easier time finding you, too.

I both can’t wait a second longer and would not feel ready if I had a hundred years. Harry says, “You ready?”

“Sort of.”

I feel kind of dizzy. I close my eyes and try to reenvision the world as one where I’m brave, and ready, and can do this, a world where everything ends well. And I try to remember what it feels like in this moment, too, because I know it’s one that’ll define the rest of my life—sever everything into a distinct before and after.

“You okay?”

There’s a buzzing in my ears. I keep my eyes closed. “Yeah.”

Tell him, I order myself. Just do it. Do it now.

“You want me to wait in the car?”

I open my eyes again. It’s so bright here I have to squint, the world constricting. “What? No.”

He grins. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

I’ll tell him later, then. I feel blurred, like if you looked at me I’d be wavering, a heat mirage rising off the asphalt.

I go up the portable’s two metal steps, my legs like gelatin. My footsteps are loud, and I cringe. I don’t want anyone to come out before I’m ready, and it feels—even though we aren’t—like sneaking around. No one comes out, though. I knock.

A white guy in his mid-to late twenties answers the door, and when I look behind him, my eyes scanning for her, there’s no one but another guy about the same age sitting at a computer pushed against the wall.

“Uh, hi,” he says. He glances back toward the other guy. They must not get many drop-in visitors here. “Can I help you?”

“Hi,” I say. “I’m here to see Joy.” When they look at me blankly, I say, “Joy Ballard?”

“You’re here to see Joy?” the one at the computer says. Both guys look at me strangely, then at each other. “She know you’re coming?”

“Kind of.” He keeps looking at me, his eyebrows raised, so I say, “Probably not specifically today, though.”

“Huh. Okay.” He glances at the clock. “Well, she’s out in the field, but I think she’ll be back any minute now. You want to come inside?”

“Ah—” I glance back toward Harry. Already this is veering off of the scene I’d drawn out in my head. But that’s fine, that’s how life goes; you adapt. “We’ll just hang out and wait out here. I don’t want to bug you guys.”