On our first day at Glacier, we were followed for our first half mile of the trail by a man who yelled “Hey bear!” over and over. He caught up to us when Christine stopped to tie her shoe, so close he almost touched my elbow.
“I need to tell you ladies,” he said, panting despite the flat ground, “I’ve been behind you for a while now, and I can’t hear you. If I can’t hear you, the bears can’t hear you.”
Christine stood, a quick flick of limbs and hair, the space her body took up in the cold air a challenge. She was silent. I too was silent.
“It’s no joke,” the man said. “I came across a grizzly on this trail just yesterday.” His throat tendons jumped. Sweat ran in little rivers from his ears to his patchy beard.
We stood, the three of us a hard triangle, staring, until Christine and I won. The man gave up and walked away.
“I’m a volunteer ranger,” he said, a parting shot over his shoulder. “I’m just telling you ladies.”
We waited until he was out of sight before we too walked on.
“Fucking junior ranger,” Christine said. “Maybe we want to see bears.” Despite the blade in her voice, I could hear a longing, and this made me maybe angrier than the man. I thought at twenty-five, after the facts of our lives, she should have grown harder, should know better than to put her wants on display. This was the reason that men like the volunteer ranger thought they could come up to us and do something to us.
“Bears,” I called, loud enough that he would hear, “come eat this asshole.”
“Hope it’s loud enough for him,” Christine said.
But he didn’t reappear. We listened for him, but we heard only the far-off hiss and whisper of waterfall. A scuttling near the ground that let us know we were never alone.
We were never alone. Not as children, in the dark caverns of our bunk beds. Not as adults, twined always to each other by the music of our nights in those beds. Cymbal crash of head on stove-top, triangle ting of glass as it settled, shard by shard.
We hiked on. The ground changed: mud to rock, back again. We swelled with the thrill of hardship. Each twisted ankle, exhilarating. The water that filled our shoes when we landed short after leaping a creek felt like a victory.
We talked about the volunteer ranger, what we would do to him.
“We have the bear spray,” Christine said, her hair slicing the air behind her as she climbed over a fallen aspen trunk. “And our knives.”
“Once we get him on the ground,” I said, “we can finish him off with rocks.”
“All his brains, splattering out.”
“Think of how many bears that would attract.”
We laughed and laughed.
We had no bear spray or knives in our childhood beds, but we had rocks and sticks. We collected them. We took other things too, starting in the corners of our kitchen, shards of glass and dinner plates. When our father came across us, hunched near the refrigerator in the pre-dawn dark, Christine fled to our room, but I refused.
“It’s none of your business,” I said, when he demanded to know what we were doing. I could stare him down just like I’d stared down the volunteer ranger.
It didn’t matter that he would turn on me the same way he turned on our mother. The words between his teeth—stubborn, disrespectful, bitch—might, in my hands, become weapons. The way my skin grew a rainbow—green, blue, a deep purple that was almost black—only gave
me more power.
We took things from the bathroom: razor blades housed in their clear plastic case (our father would blame our mother for their absence), used tissues in the waste basket (no telling what might help us). We stole from neighbors’ yards and garden sheds. Broken flower pots. Rose twigs with thorns that cut our palms. We tried not to wash the blood; we felt there was power in the cracked, rust-colored coating it became.
We stuffed my school backpack with all these things. We tucked the backpack under my blankets like a child. When the time came, it would open itself and show us how its contents might be used.
Christine, younger, feebler. She clawed at my arms trying to get into the top bunk where I slept. I wanted to push her down, but I never did. I was forced to hold her small body to mine, greasy hair clinging to my neck creases, breath souring my teeth and tongue.
Once we came together again as adults, Christine and I never talked about that time. We never talked about what happened after our father took her away. Really, we didn’t talk much at all. Going to Glacier together had been Christine’s suggestion, and I’d gone along because I couldn’t find a way to say no.
I didn’t know what to make of Christine, how to be with her. Before Glacier, hoping to learn something about her, I scrutinized the Amazon purchases she made on our shared Prime account. I paid for it. I gave her my password. It seemed like a penance of some kind. Her addresses changed often—first New Mexico, although not close to our native Belen—Gallup, Shiprock, Crownpoint—then California—Alhambra, Cerritos, El Segundo. Places I’d never heard of.
The things she bought on Amazon didn’t change. Laundry soap, toilet paper, lingerie that was mostly lace, body creams, boots, sleep supplements. Hundreds of dollars every month. Sometimes she used my credit card instead of hers. I couldn’t decide if it was an accident or provocation, but I never mentioned it to her. I mostly wondered how she could keep so many things, how she moved them to the various addresses that appeared in the Amazon account. But maybe she didn’t. Maybe she discarded them with each move. That would explain, at least, why she bought so much.
She seemed to have no fixed career. “You know,” she said when I asked her once what her work was. “Just this and that.” I couldn’t tell if she thought I did know, or if she was being deliberately coy.
Christine and I hobbled from trailhead to parking lot in the twilight. It was empty, except for our rental car.
“What if I lost the keys?” Christine said.
“You didn’t.”
“What if I did?”
“We’d have to let the bears eat us. We’d have to let junior ranger rape us.”
She laughed. The headlights flashed, the car beeped, she released the locks. I felt like I’d been given some reprieve.
The day before, Christine had taken the keys from me in the airport rental lot. “I can drive,” she said. “I love driving.” I let her, despite the fact that the car was in my name. I pretended it didn’t frighten me, the way she swung from lane to lane.
Out on the highway Christine sped toward a sign illuminated by a spotlight: “Whiskey Distillery, Montana Made.” Tasting room open until ten.
“Stop,” I told Christine, although I was so tired. “We should stop.” It seemed like the kind of thing Christine might want me to say.
Christine took the car to the roadside with a hard thrust of her leg on the brake. We skidded on the parking lot gravel, briefly disconnected from the earth, but Christine steered us through with an ease that made me wonder where she’d learned it.
We went into the narrow tasting room. We were the only customers. Behind the bar, a boy who looked no older than sixteen.
“You ladies seen any bears yet?” he asked us.
We laughed. The bartender laughed too. I could see some fear in his eyes, knew he didn’t understand the joke.
We ordered three flights and drank too quickly. It wasn’t good alcohol, too sharp and too syrupy, flavored with pear and huckleberry, but we hadn’t come to drink good alcohol.
Afterward, we went out into the dark, both too drunk to drive safely. It gave us some protection, I thought, the way we took such risks with our lives.
In my head, there was always an edge, a place where the world fell into gray sheer, nothing, and I believed that if I walked just along the rim, showing no fear, I could drive it away, the cliff that threatened to pull me over its lip.
And maybe I had. I did well, or well enough, in spite of my childhood. I was an attorney. If I’d started out representing people who might have been like my mother, I kept this to myself. I no longer did domestic violence cases, restraining orders with their lists of allegations—broken
teeth, hospitals, wrist surgeries. All of those clients looked unsympathetic on the witness stand. They laughed. Their eyes moved shiftily. Judges didn’t believe them. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to show up for their hearings. Most of them couldn’t pay. I had to beg the billing manager to write them off. It wasn’t a good look for a new associate.
I moved on to custody battles. These clients were mostly men. I gave them no sympathy when they raged about the unfairness of the judge who wouldn’t let them move with their children to California or reduce their child support payments.
“It’s the system,” I said. I stared them down, forced them to look away. They had the same expression as my father when he came across me in the dark corners of the kitchen. Bitch. Cunt. Frigid cuntbitch. I billed them and billed them until they paid.
After years of broken glass and fights in the night, our father filed for divorce. I was fourteen and Christine was nine. She went with him, not by choice, but by court decree. He’d thrown me (stubborn, disrespectful, bitch) to my mother as a consolation prize.
“What could I do?” my mother said reproachfully to me when she returned from the court hearing that decided our fate. “He has all the credit cards. He can pay some fancy attorney, and I get half the debt.” The whites of her eyes were red and reptilian from the crying she had done on
her drive home, her voice like twisted rubble after a house fire.
Christine was in our room. I could go to her. We’d collected so many things. Wasn’t this what they were for?
I pressed my thighs hard against the edge of the kitchen table. I watched my mother weep. She was repulsive, like a worm crushed under a rock.
Back at the hotel, Christine flicked through the day’s photos on her phone. “You’re an attorney, right?”
I couldn’t think of a way to answer her. She knew I was.
“I have a question. Like a legal question. If I move out of Powell’s place, but I can’t get my stuff right away, can he just throw it away?”
She’d told me earlier that she’d only lived with Powell for three months. She hadn’t even unpacked most of her things.
“I guess it depends.” That answer that wasn’t an answer at all. The truth: I didn’t know the answer, and I didn’t want to admit it.
“I mean I probably won’t leave him anyway.” She went back to her phone. “What about you? Are you with anyone?”
“Not really.” What could I say. A woman culled here and there from a dating app every few months could hardly count. What I wanted wasn’t companionship. What I wanted was a way to keep the cliff edge away, to put myself in some danger, embody it, escape it.
Before we drove to the trailhead the next morning, Christine stopped at the visitor center and took a park newsletter, smudgy ink and thin paper. I read while Christine drove. “Top ten causes of death in Glacier National Park. Are they trying to welcome people or scare them away?”
“What are they?” Christine said.
“Number one is falls.”
“Like waterfalls?”
“No, fall falls. Like idiots tripping and falling down falls.”
Bears didn’t even make the list.
“Disappointing,” Christine said. “Someone should tell junior ranger.”
After our father and Christine were gone, my mother and I moved, one small apartment to the next, places that my mother could never quite afford on her cleaning wages. I was relieved by the moves. No time to see Christine in any of the places where we landed. No time to imagine her small clothes scattered on my bed. No time to wonder about what might be happening to her.
Christine sent me a text when she turned eighteen. Hey it’s christine. Mom said this was your number. Just wanted to see if you wanted to call or meet up or anything.
I’d just moved to Michigan, a world of black ice and wind chill. I was driving when her text came through, in one of those ordinary snowstorms that felt to me like an apocalypse. The phone lit the dark interior of the car like a grenade.
By that time, I’d put Christine in a box that I made sure to never open, kept her on the back shelf of my mind.
I waited three days to answer. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid. I didn’t know what to say. Then, on day three: Sure.
She answered almost immediately, a desperation that alarmed me. Do you want to come over? I just got an apartment.
I live in Michigan now, I said.
Nothing for three months.
And then, maybe we could find a way to meet up.
We met at a Starbucks in the Denver airport a year later, both of us on layovers, although neither of us asked the other where we were going. Separated for ten years, our magnetic fields disturbed, we were just as likely to repel as to conjoin. We pretended to drink coffee and tried to
find things to say to one another.
Christine wore her hair long, a shade lighter than I remembered. Dramatic makeup, blue lipstick, brown metallic sheen on her eyelids. Colors that made no pretense at nature. But she seemed normal. Undamaged.
“I hike a lot,” she said. I was surprised by this. Her perfect hair, her nails didn’t make me think of a person who hiked. “If we had more time, we could’ve gone up to Estes Park now. I’ve been there twice. Next, I really want to go to Glacier.”
“We could go together sometime,” I said. I didn’t really mean it. But then, six months later, a text from Christine. I couldn’t find a way to turn her down. I met her in Whitefish.
The third day’s trail at Glacier was rockier than the one before, ground all scramble. I couldn’t raise my eyes from the green-tinged stones underfoot. No way to look at the pines, the gray space that might have been glacier, lurking on the far mountains when the trees gapped. We saw no one. We didn’t fall. Our footsteps, clumsy and heavy, sent rocks cascading in our wake, but they bounced harmlessly, did no damage.
After the court hearing, our father came home in his new BMW followed by a police car. In case things got ugly, he said.
He stood imperiously at the table’s head. “Hurry,” he said, drumming his fingers on the dirty tablecloth. I could feel the rhythm of it in my legs, still pressed to the table-edge. “I’ve got somewhere to be at seven.”
Before this, I hadn’t thought about where my father might go, what he might do after the divorce. I only thought of the way he would be gone, and I felt like I had caused it, brought about some victory.
I peeled my thighs away. It was like tearing a tongue from a block of ice. I followed my mother to the bedroom to find Christine, and I thought, somehow, that once we were there, she would do the thing she had never done before. Fight.
But all she said to Christine was, “You need some clothes. Don’t you want your clothes?”
Christine’s face was a gray color, the color of far-off mountain. She wasn’t frightened the way she was when she came into my bed at night. She’d changed, and I didn’t know what I might do for her in this new state. She turned to the bed, and took, not the backpack, waiting for her on the pillow, but a stuffed bear, an old thing that meant nothing. It was soft and resigned. It would never become a weapon.
At Glacier, I wanted to believe that Christine was like me, or that I might become like her. That we weren’t destined to be inscrutable to each other.
But what could I point to in Christine that would have led me to believe she was like that, that she was like me?
On our third night in Whitefish, she was silent and sulky. When we got back to the hotel, she went into the bathroom, came out with face like a stone.
“I’m going to buy beer.” She left before I could give her any response.
I wondered if I’d been wrong to suggest that we share a room. I thought, maybe that it would be a repeat of sorts, that I might see where I’d gone wrong, that I might make some amends. Christine hadn’t objected, but hadn’t I known that she wouldn’t?
Our luggage, the things we’d brought had nothing in common. Christine had so many makeup bags, filled with all her tubes and powders, bottles and brushes. Once Christine was gone, I cradled her thin sticks of eyeliner—brown, turquoise, magenta—like they were children.
Christine came back to the hotel two hours later, sulky, smelling like pot. “They’re out of beer,” she said, and that was all. “How is that even a thing? We’re stuck with this shitty White Claw. Hope you like grapefruit.”
“I’ll survive, I guess.” I hoped she would laugh, but she didn’t.
“I’m going to take a shower.” She disappeared back into the bathroom. I lay on the bed, drinking hot, citrus-y fizz, and listened to the hum of the water as it came through the pipes, the flatulent sounds of Christine’s shampoo bottle.
The next morning, Christine bent over her phone, scouring the tiny maps on the park website. I slurped my thin hotel coffee. I was worn down, the hard surfaces of my bone like rockface, scraping every time I moved. I didn’t want to hike anymore.
“This trail gets closest to the glacier,” Christine said. “But we’d have to go all the way around to the other entrance. It’d be like an hour, hour and a half drive.”
“Might as well,” I said, without enthusiasm.
“See them before they’re gone,” Christine said.
I laughed. She didn’t.
The only sign of glaciers, a gray blush in the far crevices. After we’d been hiking for nearly an hour, we took a sharp turn in the trail and came up against a cluster of people, seven or eight of them, all gaping at bears. A mother and three cubs climbing a far crag of rock. Distant
like the glaciers. Blurry, indistinct. No threat.
I was angry. At the crowd, at the way we joined them, at the bears who seemed like a staged trick. To them, I would look to them no different than these other gawking people.
And maybe I was no different. The long night of my childhood hadn’t made me special. My life and the casual way I threw it around wouldn’t offer me what I longed for.
I elbowed my way past a woman with a selfie stick, past two men, phones aloft for photos. I didn’t wait for Christine, but somehow, she was at my side, matching me move for move.
We left the people behind. We hiked uphill. The trees thinned. The earth tangled with rocks that threatened our every step.
I looked back at Christine. She was a stranger, stone lurking behind her eyes, cheeks sheets of granite. Her face was like the rocks underfoot, no way to tell if she would hold or collapse. It was the same look she had when our father came to take her.
I let her pass me when I felt her steps at my heels. The uneven ground didn’t seem to wrong-foot her. She moved easily, determinedly, the long bones of her thighs slicing the cold air as they moved her body up and up. She was going somewhere that I couldn’t follow, or maybe she’d always been.
The air grew colder. Our breath turned to cloud. We came at last to a gate, one post planted next to the steep cliff of rock on our right, the other attached to a chain-link that ran away to our left, until it vanished into the rock and the pines below.
Hazard Area, read the sign attached to the gate. Icy conditions. Enter at your own risk. It was pocked with rust. Long streaks of brown ran down the metal, blurring the words.
“Well,” Christine said. “What do we do?”
There was a challenge in the way she thrust her chin at me.
I considered. The gate was no real barrier. The gap between the post and the actual gate was made for people to cross. The sign didn’t say we were prohibited. Enter at your own risk. That was all.
The shapes of Christine’s nose and lips shifted like uneasy ground. The light broke on her face as the sun met the line of the mountaintop
There must be something I could offer her.
“We can go a little way,” I said. “We can always turn around if it gets too hard.”
The ground beyond the gate was cracked and raw and patched with snow. It looked no different than the ground where we stood.