Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two days after Carmen’s studio, Sam took them on the hike she’d been promising all week.
The trailhead was twenty minutes from the house, past the turnoff for Carmen’s road and up a switchback that made Stella grab the door handle twice.
Sam drove slightly too fast, one hand on the wheel, talking about the geological history of the canyon like she’d memorized it from a book she’d read once and never returned.
“The red is iron oxide,” Sam said, pulling into a dirt lot at the trailhead. “The layers you’re seeing are millions of years of the earth rusting. Essentially the whole canyon is a very old, very beautiful piece of oxidized metal.”
“Poetic,” Stella said from the back seat.
“Accurate,” Sam said. “Poetry and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.”
Stella moved ahead almost immediately, camera out, shooting the light on the cliff face quickly, without stopping, the camera coming up and going down in one motion. Within ten minutes she was a hundred yards ahead of them and getting smaller.
Sam and Bea walked together, slower. The trail was wide enough for two. The morning was cool and the air smelled like juniper and dust and something mineral that Bea had started to recognize as the smell of the rocks themselves.
Sam showed them colors in the cliff—the iron oxide layers, the way the morning light turned the red to orange to gold depending on the hour.
She gestured toward a streak of white limestone running through the red like a vein.
She stopped at a bend in the trail where the view opened up wide and far and she stood there for a second without saying anything, just looking, and Bea stood beside her and looked too.
“Carmen paints this canyon from about six different angles,” Sam said after a while. “She’s been painting it for thirty years and she says she hasn’t gotten it right yet.”
“Maybe getting it right isn’t the point.”
Sam looked at her. “That’s exactly what she says.”
The trail curved upward along the rim. Stella was a dot ahead of them now, crouched on a rock with her camera aimed at something below the ridge.
Sam was talking about how the light shifted on the north face in the afternoons when Bea said it.
“Why did you leave?”
She said it to the canyon. Without turning her head. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears and the crunch of their feet on the gravel and a bird somewhere above them calling to nobody.
Sam was quiet for two steps. Three.
“Oh, honey,” Sam said, and her voice was warm and easy, the same voice she used for everything.
“I always meant to come back. I kept thinking next month, and then the light would change somewhere and I’d follow it, and then it was a year and then it was five.
You know how it is—you start something and you look up and time has just gone.
” She put her hand on Bea’s shoulder, briefly, and nodded ahead with the other.
“See that formation? The one that looks like a cathedral? That’s where Carmen sets up for the north-light series.
If we keep going another ten minutes you can see the exact angle she uses. ”
Sam said ‘always meant to’ like time was a thing she could pick back up whenever she wanted. Like there would always be another hike, another dinner, another chance to finish the sentence.
And they were talking about Carmen again.
Bea walked beside her grandmother and tried to locate the place where the answer had ended and the subject had changed, and she couldn’t find it.
It was all one motion—the warmth, the hand on her shoulder, the pivot to Carmen, the enthusiasm carrying them forward up the trail like nothing had been asked at all.
She held her face still and kept walking.
The formation was beautiful. Everything was beautiful.
Sam stood beside her and showed her where Carmen set her easel and how the light hit the north face at four o’clock and Bea listened and looked and filed the answer—I always meant to come back—in a place she’d examine later, when she was home, when she wasn’t standing in a canyon with a woman who smelled like sage and was gesturing at something magnificent.
That night Sam made a real dinner—chicken with peppers and onions and rice, the kind of meal that proved she could cook when she remembered to buy food.
They ate on the patio, the smell of roasted peppers still drifting from the kitchen.
The rock changed color as it had every night, and now Bea understood why Carmen painted it over and over. It was never the same rock twice.
Sam was telling them about a ceramicist in Taos who fired her work in a pit she’d dug in her backyard when Bea said, “Sam, you said you wanted to see Stella’s photographs. The first night, at dinner.”
Sam set her fork down and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Oh—did I say that? I’m sorry, I completely lost track of the days. Stella, can I see them?”
Stella looked at Bea and raised her eyebrows. She went to the bedroom and came back with a folder. She set it on the patio table and opened it, laying out six prints left to right without commentary—deliberately, no explanation.
Sam pulled the prints forward.
Bernie at the booth. Margo at the grill. Tyler at the register. Anna with her hand on the doorjamb. Joey mid-gesture at the pass. The light through the front windows of the Shack at ten-fifteen on a Saturday morning.
“These are good,” Sam said. She picked up the one of the light through the windows and held it at an angle, studying it. “Really good. You have your father’s eye.” She set it down. “He used to shoot like this. The quiet stuff. The in-between moments.”
Stella nodded.
“So, tell me more about the series you’re anchoring with,” Sam said, turning to Bea. “Carmen mentioned your use of negative space and I want to hear more about that.”
Bea opened her mouth to answer and then stopped.
She looked across the table at Stella, who was gathering her prints back into the folder one at a time.
Bernie first. Then Margo. Then Tyler. Carefully, the way you handle things that nobody asked to see again.
Stella closed the folder and set it on the chair beside her, picked up her water glass and drank from it and didn’t look at anyone.
“The negative space,” Sam said. “Tell me.”
“It’s—I’m still figuring it out,” Bea said. She talked about her series and Sam asked questions and poured more wine and the conversation moved. Bea talked and answered and watched Stella’s prints sitting on the chair where nobody was looking at them.
After dinner Sam refused help with cleanup. “My kitchen, my music, my rules.” She carried the dishes inside and the Cuban guitar started up from the speaker on the counter.
Bea sat on the patio. Stella had gone to bed early, saying she was tired.
The rock was dark against the sky, and the stars were different from Laguna—more of them, and closer.
Sam had remembered her at the foot of the bed at six years old.
Sam had called Carmen at seven in the morning.
Sam had stood on a trail above the canyon and answered the biggest question of Bea’s life in a sentence that took four seconds and then pointed at a rock.
Not one mention of her own children. Bea’s mom, Uncle Tyler, Aunt Meg—nothing.
She’d never even asked how it was that Stella came into the family. Not a single question.
And tonight Sam had looked at Stella’s photographs—photographs that were beautiful and true, full of the kind of seeing Stella did better than anyone—and had said these are good, you have your father’s eye and then asked Bea about negative space.
Bea didn’t know what to do with all of it.
She couldn’t make it one thing. It wasn’t one thing.
Sam was wonderful and Sam was absent and Sam was right here and Sam was already somewhere else, and never even asked about her children, and all of that was true at the same time and Bea was seventeen and didn’t have a drawer to put it in.
She texted her mother.
I asked her why she left. I’ll tell you about it when I’m home. I’m okay.
The reply came in under a minute.
I love you, Bea.
I love you too, Mom.
Bea set the phone on the arm of the chair and looked at the rock until it was too dark to see. Then she went inside and checked on Stella, who was in bed with her headphones in and her eyes open, looking at the ceiling.
“You okay?” Bea asked from the doorway, one hand on the frame.
“Yeah.” Stella pulled one headphone out. “Good hike today.”
“Yeah.”
“Night, Bea.”
“Stella?”
“Yeah?”
“Your photos are really good. You know that, right?”
Stella looked at her for a second. Something changed in her voice. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
She put the headphone back in and closed her eyes, and Bea stood in the doorway and watched her cousin lie there pretending to sleep and thought about a folder of photographs sitting on a chair where nobody was looking at it.
She went to her own bed and lay there, the dry desert air on her skin and the sheets cool against her legs, and listened to the house settle and thought about all of it—Carmen’s studio and the canyon and the four-second answer and Stella’s prints that Sam had held for thirty seconds before turning back to Bea.
The whole complicated, confusing week.