“We’re at campsite twenty-one tonight, right?” Ash asks. “And there are two other sites near us?”
“Right,” Caro says. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a bag of dried fruit. She holds it out to the other two, and they each take a few. They’re dried apricots, Hope’s favorite. “But let’s try not to worry about the guys for now. Let’s enjoy the hike. Okay?”
“Okay.” Ash crouches down to look at a flower growing in the red dirt. It’s cream-colored, three petaled. She shucks her backpack from her shoulders and rummages around for her camera. “Sorry,” she says. “I know I’m holding us up.”
“Not a problem,” Caro says. “We’re making good time.”
When Ash has taken a picture she likes, she stashes the camera back in her pack and they carry on. The creek is wider and deeper here, and the hiking sticks prove useful.
“So what are your other favorite things about this area?” Ash asks Caro. Then she taps Hope gently on the arm with one of her hiking sticks. “Or maybe I should askyou,” she says. “Since you’re from here and all that. A real local.”
“Good thing I knew my high school mascots.” Hope researched every aspect of this trip meticulously. If she was going to bring the others into this canyon to disappear with her, she was going to make sure she didn’t phone anything in. The stakes are too high. “Of course, Caro’s therealexpert,” she says. “I’m the impostor.”
“There’s a drive called the Devil’s Backbone that I love.” Caro’s voice has loosened, and Hope’s relieved. “My dad and I used to do it every fall.” She stabs her stick into the creek to maneuver around an algae-slicked boulder. Hope is starting to understand Caro’s dad’s bowling balls comment—the rocks and cobble under the waterdoknock against your ankles, even with hiking boots, and you can only go so fast in some places in the creek. Still, there’s something unfaltering about the way Caro hikes, even when she inevitably slips on a rock or has to adjust to the terrain. Hope watches the muscles move in Caro’s back as they walk. “It’s this road with sheer drops to either side,” Caro is saying. “You can see forever. Into Eden, and into another national park near Lake Powell. There’s only room for one car at a time on most of it.”
“Is it as terrifying as it sounds?”
“Worse,” Caro says. “My dad’s old Chevy Blazer had a manual transmission. He taught me to drive it when I turned sixteen, and when he thought I was ready he made me take it on the Devil’s Backbone. He said if I could drive stick shift on that road, I could drive anywhere.”
“How many times do you think you’ve driven it since?”
“Who knows,” Caro says. She tucks the empty fruit package into herpocket. “At the end of the Devil’s Backbone there’s this small town with a really great grill. We always stopped there to eat.”
“Do you and your dad still do that?” Ash asks.
“Not recently,” Caro says. “Maybe I should try.” She exhales. “The truth is, he’s kind of unpredictable. He might love it. He might hate it. He might not even know where he is and think I’m a stranger kidnapping him and taking him someplace he’s never been before.”
“That’s so hard,” Ash says. “I’m sorry, Caro.”
“Me too,” Hope says.
A cacophony of noise is echoing its way up to them from farther down the canyon. The voices are high, birdlike, excited.Teenagers, Hope thinks, and as soon as they round the bend, she sees them: A gaggle of kids in brightly colored clothes with wild hair and skinny limbs packing up gear on one of the natural sandbars. They’ve clearly been camped there for the night and are getting ready to leave.
“Sorry about all this,” says a woman in a T-shirt that saysLEAVENOTRACEas Hope, Ash, and Caro come within range. “We’re getting a slow start this morning.”
“Looks like fun,” Ash says. A few teenagers shriek with glee as one of their tents disintegrates into a pile of poles and nylon.
“That’s one word for it,” the woman says. A harried-looking man lets out a piercing whistle. The teenagers cover their ears and turn in his direction. “Sorry about that, too.”
“No worries,” Caro says. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
The teens wave at the women as they pass the campsite, and several of them call out, “Good morning!” Ash, Caro, and Hope call and wave back.
“Everyone in southern Utah is so friendly,” Ash says. “Has it always been this way?”
“I think so.” Caro’s glancing back at the group with fondness in her eyes. “Remember being that age?”
“I was never that age,” Ash says. Then she grins. “Kidding,” she says. “I’m still that age.”
“I think we all are in some way,” Caro says.
Hope doesn’t know if she agrees. She doesn’t know how old she feels. Her industry will screw you up in that regard in every single way. Other people always picking at her body, commenting on it, saying whether they’d want to sleep with it or not, wanting it to look like this, dressing it like that.
And all the procedures. She hasn’t done nearly as much as most—if she starts to look like everyone else, she won’t look like anyone. She’s smart enough to know that, and she’s lucky that she grew up with parents who emphasized exercise because you loved it, not because it could make you thin. But in adulthood she’s had to exercise to look aspecificway, to have a certain shape, and sometimes that shape changes for different roles. She’s always being plucked and highlighted and trimmed and tanned and untanned and freckled and de-freckled, whatever the role requires. There are the steam rooms and saunas and workouts and injections and lasers and facials, and yes, she can see how it might sound amazing, but it leaves her with the feeling that her body is a thing meant to be maintained, not enjoyed. There was the freezing of her eggs before she turned thirty. She did three rounds, and it was no joke. But Hope’s nothing if not prepared, and what if she actually met the right person too late?
Well.
