In the Heart of the Canyon (17 page)

Lots of people were keeping journals, she noticed. Mitchell had a dirt-colored spiral notebook. Amy wrote in something covered with floral fabric. As for Evelyn, she preferred ordinary composition books, marbled black and white, with a blank spot on the cover to note the date and location. She’d always kept travel journals, one for each trip, ever since she was a child. Back in Cambridge, she kept them lined up on a lower bookshelf, in chronological order, her own set of personal abstracts.

It seemed to Evelyn that Matthew was being unfairly shunned for his behavior up at Phantom. All he’d done was make a valiant effort to entertain the dog. What was so wrong with that, even if it ended up the way it did?

After lunch she saw the boy sitting forlornly with the dog, while Sam and his father were occupied with something in the boat. Evelyn saw this as an opportunity, not just to comfort Matthew but to try and make friends with the dog. And so she approached them with a hesitant smile. Matthew had taken off his hat, and his scalp looked pale and vulnerable through his buzz cut.

“Mind if I pat the dog a little?” she asked.

Matthew shifted to make room for her. The dog immediately rolled over and splayed his legs. Evelyn hesitated, then tapped his chest.

“Actually, he likes it like this,” Matthew told her, and he bent over the dog and rubbed his stomach vigorously. One of the dog’s hind legs batted the air.

“Try that,” he told her.

Tentatively, Evelyn patted the dogs abdomen. There didn’t seem to be much belly room, with all his male apparatus, and she was afraid she might, well, stimulate him.

“Harder,” said Matthew.

Evelyn rubbed her fingers in small circles, careful to stay in one area. The dog’s leg began to kick in response.

“See? He likes you. Now try this,” and Matthew stood up and dug in his pocket and pulled out some Gummi Bears, frosted with sand and lint. He handed one to Evelyn, who hesitated, then offered it to the dog.

“Good job,” said Matthew, scrumbling the dog’s ears.

“Do you like animals generally?” Evelyn asked.

“I like mammals,” said Mathew. “And I love reptiles. I want to go to the Galápagos Islands.”

“I’ve been there!” Evelyn exclaimed.

“I was Charles Darwin for Major Thinkers Day,” Matthew went on. “We rented a white beard for me to wear. I made my finches out of feathers from Hobby Village. All their beaks were different,” he said proudly.

“I’m very impressed!”

“How come you’re on this trip alone?” Matthew asked suddenly.

“Well,” said Evelyn, taking the time to think of a good answer, “I like to do things alone, I guess.”

“I don’t. I hate being alone. My mom likes it, though. Sometimes she wants to be alone so bad, she goes and locks herself in the bathroom.”

Although Matthew’s hair was no more than half an inch long, Evelyn noticed it was already growing back into its genetic whorl.

“And it’s not just me and Sam that make her go in there,” he went on. “She goes in there on the weekend, when my dad’s home. My dad’s not home a lot, though.”

“What does your dad do?”

“Something in Japan. One time he brought me and Sam some comic books and he brought my mom a bathrobey thing and she wasn’t very nice about it. I hope they’re not going to get divorced.”

Evelyn’s heart lost its balance, and she felt the color rise in her neck. “I’m sure they’re not,” she said hastily. “Look, they’re having such a good time together.”

Matthew looked over to where Jill was laughing with JT; Mark and Sam were still off in the boat.

“I guess,” he said dully. “If we could just get a dog,” he added, scratching the dog’s ears.

A spasm of loneliness gripped Evelyn right then. She suddenly wished, with all her heart, that she had urged Julian to come after all. There was nobody with whom she was feeling a real kinship; she was a fifth wheel, unintegrated, both superior and inferior to everyone.

How did you express that, mathematically?

T
hat evening, to mark the end of a very long day, JT mixed up a bucket of margaritas. He had just started ladling them out when some hikers came traipsing through the bushes, a weary group of women whose first task upon reaching the river was to shed their clothes and dash into the water. No one was more intrigued than the two boys, who stopped arguing over the can smasher and knelt in rapt attention at the sight of four naked women whooping it up in the river. They were even more impressed when one of them recognized Abo and, after wrapping herself in a sarong, came over to look at some photos he had dug out from his ammo box. The can smasher lay idle.

Eventually, all the women wandered over, and in exchange for margaritas, JT was able to score an extra Ace bandage from them.

“Any of you happen to like dogs?” Dixie asked. “He’s really sweet. Doesn’t need much water, either.”

“Dixie,” said JT.

“Might as well ask,” Dixie said with a shrug.

“We’re not trying to pawn the dog off,” JT told the women.

“Oh yes we are,” said Dixie.

JT did not want to get into any more confrontations today—even with Dixie. Or especially with Dixie.

“No
way
did I do that,” Abo was protesting to his woman friend. “You are such a liar. Don’t anyone listen to her.”

“Are you Abo’s girlfriend?” Sam asked.

Abo looked up. “Sam, you’re way too young to be asking those kinds of questions.”

Sam whispered something to Matthew, and Matthew shoved him.

Another woman was watching Lloyd as he stood in the shallows, washing his face. “I ought to tell my grampa to do this trip,” she said.

“How olds your grampa?” said Abo.

“Older than that guy”

Lloyd finished washing and groped about for his towel, which was floating in the shallows. JT went over and picked it up, wrung it out, and handed it to Lloyd.

“Thank you,” said Lloyd, blotting his face.

“No problem,” said JT.

“My wife is in love with you, you know,” said Lloyd.

Alone in the filtered light of the tent, Ruth unwrapped the Ace bandage, dreading what she would find. Yesterday it had seemed that their careful ministrations might pay off, for the wound had calmed down noticeably. But today it had begun throbbing again, burning hot one minute and ice cold the next; she’d gotten to the point where she wanted to just rip the bandages off and stick her whole leg in the river.

She peeled off the last layer of gauze. Sure enough, the wound was red, slick, cheesy with pus.

Oh, the value of 20/20 hindsight! Regretting her earlier decision to hold off on the Cipro, Ruth frantically pawed through her day bag for the medical kit in which they kept an oblong blue pillbox with the Cipro and all the other just-in-case medicines. If she could take a Cipro right now, then she could tell JT—who was sure to come snooping around any minute—that she’d already put herself on antibiotics.

But when she finally found the canvas kit and unzipped it, there was no pillbox.

She knew she had packed it because she’d taken a muscle relaxant the first night. She emptied her day bag, thinking that maybe she’d simply failed to put the pillbox back into the canvas kit. No luck. She twisted around and emptied Lloyd’s day bag. No luck again.

Now Ruth felt a twinge of panic, for there were a lot of important medicines in that pillbox, not just Cipro. Had she left it back at their first campsite? Stuck it in someone else’s bag? Had Lloyd taken it? She
peeked out of her tent and saw him walking toward the tent, shaving kit in hand.

“Do you know where the blue pillbox is?” she asked when he came crawling inside the tent. He smelled of peppermint, and old coins.

Lloyd looked at the mess strewn all over the tent floor. “Who did this?”

“I did,” said Ruth. “I’ll pick it up. But I’m trying to find the pillbox. The blue pillbox, with all the little compartments. Try to remember. You said you had a headache yesterday. Did you take some migraine medicine?”

“I don’t get migraines,” said Lloyd. “You get migraines.”

Lloyd had had a migraine two days before they left Chicago. Ruth didn’t think it would be helpful to remind him.

“Well, I’m trying to find the pillbox, and I can’t,” said Ruth. “Do you know where it is?”

“Check with Becca,” said Lloyd.

“Lloyd!”—for now she was getting exasperated—“Becca’s not on this trip! It’s just you and me! And I need the pillbox!”

“Are you saying someone stole it?”

“No, I—”

Lloyd wagged his finger in front of her face. “That’s the trouble with you, Ruthie. Always jumping to conclusions.”

Ruth told herself to drop the issue. What good would it do to point out that a few mornings ago, he’d been the one jumping to conclusions over his stethoscope?

“I come home late, and you think I’m canoodling with Esther! The teacher doesn’t frame David’s finger painting, and you think David’s flunking out of kindergarten! You have to stop jumping to conclusions all the time!”

Ruth looked away. She was not, absolutely not going to cry.

“I just wish for once you’d get all the facts before you make an accusation,” Lloyd said, pulling on a flimsy white T-shirt. It was inside out and backward, so the label curled into the hollow at his throat. “And I don’t want another baby until you calm down with all this drama.”

Ruth was taken aback by this. She was accustomed to watching Lloyd slip into the past, but for him to raise this particular issue, in this new light? When David was five, Ruth and Lloyd had indeed disagreed over whether to have a second child. Lloyd, busy with his growing practice, wanted to wait. Ruth, on the other hand, didn’t want a large age gap between children. But while they’d disagreed, it had never focused on her so-called dramas, as he now put it. Had she really been so irrational?

Ruth liked to think that theirs was a successful marriage. But it had always been a quiet marriage, one without a lot of shouting. Disputes were resolved mostly by the passage of time, as each came to understand, as if by osmosis, the other’s position. Loud, accusatory fights made them both uncomfortable, for they knew that things said in the heat of an argument were often said more to inflict pain than to instill truth.

But now, as she listened to Lloyd rant, she wondered if perhaps they’d been too reserved all this time. Maybe they should have occasionally
had it out
, as Becca would have put it when she was in college. Maybe they would have understood each other better.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded.

She didn’t realize it, but she’d been staring at his face. He’d missed a dime-sized patch of stubble on his chin, and a few dark hairs poked out of his nose.

“I’m looking at you, Lloyd,” she sighed.

“Oh.” He seemed to contemplate this, and, sensing a window of opportunity, Ruth placed her palm against his cheek, for touch always seemed to bring him back to the present. His bloodshot eyes skittered through the years.

“Are you having a good time on this trip?” she asked him.

“Of course I am. I couldn’t survive without this trip every year.”

“Me, either,” said Ruth.

He leaned forward to kiss her. His whiskers tickled. “You look pretty cute,” he said gruffly.

Ruth smiled.

“Want to fool around?” he asked. “Come on! Who will notice? Becca’s out there flirting with the guides and David’s got his nose in his book. A little hanky-panky with the old man? A quick roll in the hay?”

Ruth did not remind him that the little blue pillbox had a compartment for Viagra, without which there would be no hanky-panky.

“Tonight,” she told him.

“Better keep your word,” he warned. “Don’t get my hopes up.” He leaned over and kissed her again.

“You always had a beautiful smile, Ruthie,” he said. “But now I’m going to go and have a beer. Want a beer?”

“In a bit,” Ruth said. “After I tidy up in here.”

When he was gone, she lay down on her mat and covered her face with her forearm and wept.

She was still lying on her mat when she heard the swish of footsteps in the sand.

“Ruth?”

It was JT. Hastily she smoothed her hair and sat up.

“Are you busy? Because I want to take a look at your leg before we start the dinner circus.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Ruth called out. “If you could just bring me whatever bandages you have.”

“Well, I’d really like to clean it myself,” said JT. “Are you decent? Can I come in?”

She heard his knees pop as he knelt and lifted the tent flap. “Need a hand getting out? Let’s take a look at it in the sunlight. Dixie’s got some hot water ready. Aiy,” he said as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. “Ruth. What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“It wasn’t like this at breakfast?”

“I didn’t look at it this morning. And at lunch you had the dog to deal with, and Mitchell and all. It’s not that bad,” she said.

“With all due respect, ma’am, if I took you into a clinic right now, they’d have you on antibiotics before you could blink.”

“That’s just it,” Ruth said. “I have some Cipro with me.”

“Cipro? As in
Cipro?”