Page 21 of Anywhere with You

We reached the Grand Canyon by midafternoon. We passed the East Entrance, the parking lot so full that dozens of cars were idling, waiting for even a chance to park.

“There are other lookouts, right?” I asked. “I don’t care about the gift shop and all that, do you?”

“No. Let’s just drive awhile and see if there’s a place to pull over.”

There were several places to pull over, all of them packed.

Cara stared out the window. “I guess we’re not the only ones on spring break after all.”

“Honestly, the view from here is so amazing. I almost don’t care,” I said, even though I was the one driving.

Layers of orange and red and brown stretched down and away from us, feeling endless.

The road seemed to lead away from the canyon for miles, but just when I was about to suggest we reroute, the trees ended, and our view of the canyon opened up again, even more vast and lovely.

There wasn’t a real parking lot here, only a gravel space with enough room for Cara’s car, but there was no one else around, and we didn’t dare miss our chance.

I pulled over, and we both clambered out of the car and as close to the edge of the canyon as we dared.

There were no railings here, nothing but the two of us and this natural wonder laid out before us.

“Honestly, I just expected a big hole,” I said.

Cara laughed, and I could hear it faintly echoing off the ancient walls.

We recorded our reels and took pictures for Cara to add to the Mesmio she’d made for us. We pretended to skip rocks over the canyon and shouted stupid words to hear the echo. I convinced Cara to sit next to me with our feet hanging over the edge.

“Just look,” I told her, when she seemed too tense to notice anything but her own fear.

“Here we are, and all of that, all of those ancient rocks, all that history, is right under our feet.” I wiggled mine, and she looked out with me, past our toes to what felt like the entire world, certainly more of it than we’d ever seen. Miles upon miles. Eons upon eons.

“Hey,” Cara said, pointing.

I squinted to see. There were people riding horses along a trail in the distance.

“Next time,” I joked.

Shadows of clouds crossed below, moving like ripples over the uneven rock formations.

It was quiet except for the wind, and the rocks gave off a fresh, somehow warm smell.

“Thank you for coming with me,” Cara said.

We’d moved back from the edge now and sat cross-legged on a large slab of rock free of the spindly bushes gripping the few places where soil remained.

“I know you had your own reasons for wanting to get away,” she went on, and I thought about the unopened envelope on my desk again, feeling the twinge of anxiousness that never seemed to go away.

Cara pulled me back out of my thoughts, back to the majesty of what lay out before us.

“But I am grateful. I don’t think I would’ve gone alone.”

“Why not?” I looked at her, beautiful dark hair whipping around in the breeze.

“I don’t think that I ever learned how to do things alone.

How to be alone. I relationship-hopped through college, and by the time I graduated, I was with Lorenzo.

I lived with college roommates, then with him, and this is the first time I’ve ever been by myself long enough to rearrange the furniture.

” She huffed a laugh. “And then I immediately came to see if you would go with me, so I didn’t have to stay alone in my apartment or go alone on the road.

I just couldn’t take nine days with my own thoughts. How pathetic is that?”

I wanted to hug her, but I settled for poking her in the cheek.

“Ow,” she protested.

“So you haven’t been alone because you’ve always had people around who love you?

That’s not pathetic. That’s sort of ideal human existence.

Sure, rearrange your furniture. Sure, make time for what you want.

But the goal of all this isn’t some mythical independence.

Didn’t you ever read that dude who said no man is an island? Tolstoy?”

“John Donne.”

“Right. I mean, romance isn’t the goal. Or sex. I know you’re a biologist, but sex isn’t the whole point. I mean, it’s pretty good. Really good. Great, sometimes. But it can’t be the whole point.”

“So what is?”

“It’s us.” I hurried to add, “It’s all of us. Friendships and family and community and all that crap. And joy and wonder. It’s sitting in front of the Grand Canyon and actually thinking about who we are and what we want.”

Cara stared at me. “That’s pretty deep, Honeybee.”

“I’d be perfectly happy if you never called me that again,” I said, and she laughed.

“So, what do you want, Honey ?”

I shrugged. “I got what I wanted. I wanted a music shop and a wife and to not have to worry too much about the electric bill.”

“Is that still what you want?”

I stretched out my legs onto the warm rock and leaned over to dust off my guitar tattoo.

“Three months ago, I would’ve said yes without hesitation.

It’s everything that I worked for, and I was happy.

But now I have to wonder, was I? Am I? Because all of a sudden there’s this great gaping hole.

” I gestured to the Grand Canyon with a snorting laugh, and Cara humored my pathetic joke with a grin.

“Was it always there? I feel like I’ve made the big changes that I meant to make in my life and neglected the little ones. ”

Cara was nodding. “I feel like maybe I’ve done the opposite, that I filled up my life with little things that improve my day without considering the massive things that made me unhappy.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. So what do we do now?”

“I have no idea.”

After a time, Cara asked softly, “Do you still love her?”

I took a deep breath before I answered, trying to put words to something that up to now, I’d only felt.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s like I should be able to stop all at once, but that’s harder than it sounds.

I kind of…I kind of don’t want my life going forward to be about missing her or hating her.

I don’t even want this week to be about that.

My life is bigger than her, and it always has been.

” I stopped, pressing my palms into the warm rock.

Cara listened intently, not rushing to fill the silences.

I liked that about her, I realized, but her silence drew words out of me like no one I’d ever met.

I’d barely even spoken to my parents about Bridget, past saying that she was an ugly cheater and her nose was unnaturally small, a fact that I had carried in silence for years, and that I never wanted to talk about her again.

They respected that, but maybe they shouldn’t have.

Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Maybe I should’ve had a real conversation with the people who loved me most in the world.

“What about you?” I asked.

Cara shook her head. “Oh, I definitely don’t love Bridget.”

I pushed her to the side, and she laughed, straightening. But in the seconds that followed, her face grew serious, then sad.

“I just wanted to save our marriage,” she said.

“That was my whole goal. I couldn’t stand the thought of telling our families that it was over.

I would wake up at night in a complete panic, and he would pretend to still be sleeping.

” She cringed, then went on, “I used to wonder all the time, what if he was someone else, Enrique or someone I’d see at the gym, and I’d imagine this whole other life for myself, and since I was imagining, I could make it be…

more, be better than what I had. After a while, I never wanted to come back to reality.

I think…” She took a full breath in and out.

“I think that I stopped loving Lorenzo a long time ago.”

“You were really unhappy,” I said, a little surprised. Had Bridget been that unhappy? It wouldn’t excuse her being a lying, cheating bag of trash, but maybe I should’ve wondered, before now, if that was part of the reason she turned to Lorenzo. Maybe our marriage had already been failing.

“Yes. But I don’t think I realized it, or I didn’t let myself think those actual words.

I would’ve done anything to save my marriage.

Anything. And that was the focus of all my thoughts and all my energy, until…

until his bags were packed. He left the apartment key on the counter, and when he was gone, I sat there and held it. I had never felt so powerless.”

“And now?”

“Now what?” Cara asked.

“Would you take him back if he asked?”

She was shaking her head before my sentence was finished. “I think they both showed us who they are. I don’t think we can pretend, anymore, not to know.”

We sat in silence for a long time, staring out at the unearthly beauty of the canyon.

It should’ve felt wrong to have such a sad conversation in the midst of such a wonder, but instead, I stared at the layers of stone, the millennia underneath us, and it gave me a feeling of rightness I couldn’t explain.

That was the hard part, not having the words. If I’d known what to say, I could’ve shared my thoughts with Cara, and it was strange to think that I wanted to share them with her badly.

After an hour, we weren’t ready to abandon our private view of the canyon. Cara grabbed snacks, lamenting that she was already out of popcorn, and I brought out my guitar, listening for the echo of my chords below.

I’d been working on putting some of Mary Oliver’s poems to music, not to break a whole lot of copyright laws, but just for me.

After a while, the sound of tires crunching gravel interrupted my strumming.

“Ladies! Ladies, excuse me. This is a restricted area.”

Cara and I turned to find a small white man in a brown uniform emerging from the truck and bustling toward us. We looked at each other, then immediately looked around for a sign.

“I apologize,” Cara sputtered. “We were following the GPS and didn’t see—”

“Two pretty girls like you? You gotta use your brain and not those damned computers, don’t ya?

Never know where you’ll end up.” He spoke to her breasts and adjusted his belt.

I’d seen power-mad police officers do the same thing, but this asshat didn’t have a gun or a badge, just ill-fitting clothes and a sadistic tilt to his grin.

“Never seen anyone on this road who wasn’t a park ranger or a troublemaker.

Or an axe murderer, but just the one. Now, you girls—”

I was done with this conversation. If I wanted to be ogled and talked down to by gross old white men, I’d go into politics. I turned toward the car, but I knew I wouldn’t be taking a step away from Cara unless she was following. “Come on, we’ll go ahead to the next public area.”

“That’s forty miles back the way you came,” he said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder.

“All the way back to the posted lookout points. ’Round here, there’s no rails, no guards.

Anything at all could happen to a couple of pretty things like you.

I could tell you some stories. I’ve been a park ranger twenty-five years, and—”

I could tell him some stories, too, and many of them started with a friendly seeming stranger commenting on all the things that could happen to a couple of pretty things like us.

He took a step toward us. It seemed absent-minded, just shuffling his feet, but the alarm bells that had been tinkling started clanging.

“What about the other way?” Cara was asking, gesturing to the road ahead.

He frowned at her, then at her boobs. “Dead end. You gonna tell me you didn’t see that sign either? Need glasses? Or maybe you need someone to show ya.”

Cara seemed like she was about to apologize again, so I reached for her and turned her toward the car, gripping hard enough that she seemed to get my message. I had my guitar in one hand, but I didn’t take my other hand off her shoulder until she was safely in the driver’s seat.

He was still talking at us when we got in and started the engine.

I was trembling slightly as we drove away. It was strange. He’d been only vaguely threatening, but I lived in one of the largest cities in the country. I kept my own business open late. I didn’t live in the nicest part of town. I was a woman. I was accustomed to dealing with vaguely threatening.

Maybe he’d just surprised me, showing up the way he did. Maybe his tone had been enough to signal to my brain that we might be in a dangerous situation. Maybe his gawking at Cara’s chest made me want to run him over. It was hard to say.

Soon enough, I’d put him out of my mind, and half an hour later, we found the sign and the place where the lane split off from the main tourist road.

I suppose I had just kept driving in the direction of the canyon, never noticing the two-foot wooden pole with the rusted Restricted Area sign the size of a dessert plate.

We stopped and took a selfie with it.