No, they say when she asks them, no, he hasn’t escaped before, ever. He hastriedto wander off, but never successfully.
Yes, they did take a field trip last week to Story and to Cooper’s Rock Shop. It was at Henry’s suggestion, in fact. Many of the residents expressed how much they enjoyed the day. Yes, the owner and Henry did seem to know each other. They had a brief conversation, which Henry had seemed to enjoy.
He never told Caro. Why? Did he simply forget, or is it more than that?
She lifts up her phone to call Dan, her automatic response when anything happens in her life, good or bad or boring or bright.
And she puts it down.
Caro’s led Ash to believe that she’s been talking to Dan since they got out of the canyon. But she hasn’t. Lately, she’s been feeling like she’s wearing Dan out. There’s been all the stuff with her dad, of course. And then the hospital case on top of that.
And the other, bigger loss. The one so big she hasn’t told Dan about it.
Which is so absolutely wrong of her.
Caro remembers the time when she and Dan were dating and she brought him home for the weekend. She’d known her dad would be gone, taking a youth group down the Underground. She had her own key, and she knew Henry wouldn’t mind (he’d met Dan and liked him), but it felt somehow naughty to bring Dan home without her dad being there, to be totally unchaperoned. After existing in tiny shared college spaces, having a house to themselves felt like utter and total luxury. She and Dan had gotten a pizza—from the Pizza House, she remembered, delightfully oily and cheesy and covered in pepperoni and olives, her weird family favorite that Dan had cheerfully come to love, too—and they’d been watchingsports. They had joked about how they should brush their teeth before they started making out but ultimately had been far too lazy, and things had been getting very interesting when they heard the door, which they hadn’t bothered to lock, swing open.
A man stood in the doorway.
Caro had clutched the throw blanket to her. Dan, to his credit, had sprung to his feet, ready to face the attacker. Neither of them had even considered—and neither of them even recognized, for a few minutes—that it was her father.
“Caro?” he asked.
“Oh my gosh,Dad,” she said, and her fear was replaced with a wave of annoyance and frustration. “I thought you were going to be out of town. Weren’t you hiking the Underground?”
It was then that she saw he was filthy, streaked with the red-sand mud so typical of southern Utah. “Caro,” he said. “You’re alright.”
“Of course I’m alright,” she said. “What are you talking about?” and then Dan must have made some motion behind her and she said, “Dad, this is Dan, remember?”
Her father lifted a hand to Dan, but he was still looking at Caro. “There was a tragedy,” he said. “In the Underground.” His voice was shaky, raw. “A girl fell. Not with our group, but I tried to help her.” Henry sat down on the armchair abruptly, as if his legs had given out underneath him. “But there was nothing I could do. She was gone by the time I got to her.”
Later it became apparent that of course he never thoughtCarowas in the Underground; he’d just driven home in shock and horror at what had happened, and then his mind had begun racing over all the terrible things that could happen to a college-age girl. When he’d seen an unfamiliar car in his driveway, and then walked in and seen her with an unfamiliar man—he hadn’t recognized Dan immediately in the dim light—
The accident in the Underground. It had haunted her father. He saw death in his profession, but of course it made sense why someone dying in Eden would break his heart in a different way.
Wait, Caro thinks.The body we found. Could that be—
But no, of course it isn’t. People were with her. They saw her die. Her father had stayed with the girl who fell until a team came to retrieve her body. So thisotherbody—
Caro closes her eyes.
40
ASH
“WHAT THE HELL AREwe watching?” Ash asks.
She and Caro are sitting in a cherry-red Thunderbird at the drive-in theater. It is the most incongruous thing they could possibly be doing, given the situation, but they’ve washed up here like two exhausted shipmates on a desert island. They didn’t know where else to go.
“You’ve never seenPlanet of the Apes?” Caro asks.
“I have,” Ash says. “With Mark Wahlberg.”
“That’s the remake,” Caro says. “This is the original.”
“It’s disturbing.” On-screen, one of the plastic-faced apes has shot a hairy-chested Charlton Heston.
“It is.” Caro sounds weary. Ash knows that they’re both talking about the movie even though there are so many other, deeper things they could be talking about because they areworn out.
