Ember Trail

Wade Caulfield took the last exit before the town of Tropic and drove up the switchbacks with the windows down. It was hot for late June, even at seven in the morning, and the air coming through the window smelled like juniper and dust. Five years since he had driven this road, and his hands still did the same thing on the wheel, gripping at ten and two like his driving instructor was watching.

The campground at Sunrise Point was half full. Travis had booked the sites months ago for the solstice festival, two spots side by side near the rim, and Wade had spent the whole drive up telling himself that maybe Travis would be there first, that there would be a buffer, that maybe Bella would cancel. Travis had texted the night before. Family thing in Salt Lake, back Monday, you two are fine, the sites are paid for.

You two are fine. Easy for him to say.

Wade pulled the truck into site 14 and killed the engine. Site 15 already had a car in it, a gray Subaru with a roof box, and there she was on one knee next to a half-raised tent, hammering a stake into ground that was mostly rock. Bella Moreau, twenty-nine years old now, hair in a bandana, swearing quietly at the stake. She was Black, a Creole girl from Lafayette who had come west for the park service, and he was a white kid from Beaver, Utah, with a farmer's tan and a name like a hardware store. Five years had changed none of that.

He got out and stood by his tailgate for a second too long. Then the words came out before he could pick better ones.

"You actually came."

The hammer stopped. She looked up at him and gave him a flat, tired look, the kind you give a coworker who has asked the same question three times. She stood and set the hammer down on a rock.

"Hello to you too, Wade."

"Yeah. Hi. Sorry. I just meant, Travis said maybe..." He trailed off. "You look good."

"It's ninety degrees by nine a.m. Nobody looks good." She picked the hammer back up. "Are you going to help or watch?"

He helped. The two of them, back when there was a them, had a quality he had never been able to explain to anyone. They could work side by side on anything, a flat tire, a firewood stack, her sister's moving boxes, and it went smooth as a well-run kitchen. It was the other part that had wrecked him. The part where the work stopped and there was just the two of them and a night ahead.

They got his tent up without talking much. Around eleven the heat got serious and they retreated to the shade of her canopy, the one thing Travis had left behind at the storage unit in April, a green popup with one bent leg propped on a rock. Wade sat in a camp chair. Bella sat on the cooler across from him, which put her a foot higher than him and gave her the look of someone running an interview.

"So," she said.

"So."

"Five years, Wade." She pulled a flask out of her daypack, an old dented one he recognized, and unscrewed it. "You ghosted me by text and now we're camping six feet apart for three days. I figure we should talk."

"Yeah."

"Whiskey?"

"Sure."

She opened the cooler, took the flask back out, and poured a capful for him, then one for herself. The whiskey was cheap and warm and it hit the back of his throat hard. She took her sip without flinching.

"Why text?" she said. "I've had five years to wonder about this. You had a phone call in you. We talked on the phone three, four times a week for six months. Then it's a Tuesday at four in the afternoon and I get four lines about how maybe we should take a step back."

"It wasn't four lines."

"It was four lines. I still have the phone. It's in a drawer. I kept it like a lunatic evidence thing." She shook her head at herself. "People move on, obviously, I'm not sitting around crying about a text from when I was twenty-four. But I'd like to know. One time. From your actual mouth."

Wade looked at the hoodoos past her shoulder, the red spires below the rim going soft in the midday haze. He had rehearsed this in the truck. He had rehearsed it in the shower for a week. Every version sounded pathetic out loud.

"I got scared," he said.

"Of me?"

"Of the plan. That weekend. You remember what we had lined up. Cabin in Fish Lake, three days, no cell service, you'd already bought groceries." He turned the cap of the flask in his fingers. "And I sat there the night before and I thought, this is it, this is the part where she sees all of it. Everything. How much I was into her. And it was a lot, Bella. It was too much. I was twenty-three and I could feel it, that I was all in, way ahead of you, and I figured you'd figure that out in about four hours in a cabin with no phone and then I'd be that guy. The too much guy."

The campground went quiet while a family walked their dog past the sites. Bella waited until they were gone.

"You decided for me," she said.

"Yeah."

"That's the part that gets me. Not that you were scared. Scared happens. But you ran the whole thing in your head. You decided I'd be overwhelmed and bolt, and you didn't once think to ask me. You never asked me anything, Wade, that was the whole..." She stopped, pressed her lips together. "You never asked."

"I know."

"A simple conversation. Hey, this weekend, I'm feeling a lot, can we talk pace. I would have said, okay, let's talk pace. That's it. That's the whole conversation you skipped."

"I know how it sounds now."

"It sounds bad now too," she said, and took another drink. "It's just you were so good at everything else. Fixing my car, remembering my dad's surgery date, all of it. And then the one hard thing, you did the coward version."

Wade drank from his cap. Down at the rim, a raven rode a thermal over the amphitheater and didn't flap once.

"What happened," he said slowly, "was I panicked. And then I made the call, or the text, and after that I couldn't undo it. Every month it got harder to call. And then it had been a year and calling was insane, and then five."

"Five." She looked at him. "We worked a hundred yards apart for two of those years. You at the lift shack, me in the permit office. You took the lunch shift so we wouldn't cross."

"You noticed that."

"Of course I noticed. I'm not stupid, Wade. I was hurt, not blind."

The heat pressed down on the canopy. Somewhere behind the sites, someone's cooler lid clapped shut. Wade set his cap on the cooler lid between them and rubbed his thumb over the dent in the flask where she had dropped it on gravel outside a diner in Panguitch, back when they were together, back when it was already hers and not his, and an old man at the next table had stared at the two of them, a Black woman from Lafayette and a white boy from Beaver, a beat too long, and Bella had stared right back until he found his eggs.

"I ran the lift all winter," he said. "Same chair, same knobs. And I kept thinking, the worst day of my life was four lines on a Tuesday and I chose it. I picked it. Nobody made me. That's what I've been chewing on. Not losing you. That I did it to myself."

"You didn't lose me to something," Bella said. "I'm right here. I got here early this morning." She looked at the tent, at his truck, back at him. "We've got three days. I came for closure, I'll be honest about that. I wanted to say my piece and drive home Sunday feeling like a person who finished something."

"And now?"

"Now the whiskey's talking and it's a hundred degrees and you're finally saying actual sentences, so I don't know." She put the flask in the cooler and latched it. "Help me with the firewood before it gets worse. And Wade."

"Yeah."

"You're not off the hook. This was the warmup."

* * *

The afternoon was long and flat and hot, the kind of heat that makes conversation unnecessary. They kept the canopy up and read, her with a battered field guide to canyon plants, him with a paperback he'd bought at the gas station in Tropic because it was the only one there. Twice he almost said something and twice he didn't, and the second time she looked over at him like she could hear the gears.

Around six the heat finally broke a little and the light on the hoodoos went orange, and the whole amphitheater below the rim lit up like it was wired. Tourists clustered at the overlook with their phones. Wade stood at the edge of the campground with his hands in his pockets.

Bella came and stood next to him.

"It never gets old," she said. "I avoided this canyon for five years, you know. Because of you. That's a stupid thing to hand a guy."

"I'm not going to know what to do with that."

"Nobody ever does."

They ate dinner off a folding table under the canopy, beans and hot dogs and the last of the good bread. Afterward Bella stood and pointed her fork at the trailhead sign near the north end of the loop. "Navajo, before dark. I came all this way and I haven't even looked down into it yet. Not really looked."

Wade checked the sky. Sun was maybe an hour from gone. "It's a mile and a half. We'll make it."

"Then come make it."

He brought two bottles of water and the little flashlight he kept in the truck. She brought her field guide out of habit and then left it on the picnic table, which he took as a good sign. At the trailhead the switchbacks dropped away under them, forty feet of stone steps cut into the red dirt, and then they were inside the canyon and the temperature changed, cooler, denser, the air smelling of juniper and dry dust.

They didn't talk. She went first down the switchbacks, and he watched the back of her shoulders and the set of her jaw and thought about how five years had done nothing to slow her down. Tourists passed them going up, sweating, saying Excuse me, saying Wow. Bella hugged the wall and let them by without a word.

Wall Street was the narrow part, a slot between two walls of rock, cool as a cellar. Wade ran his hand along the stone as he walked. "You okay back there?" Bella called.

"Fine."

"You're quiet."

"I'm reading the trail."

She laughed at that, a short laugh, and kept walking. At the bottom the canyon opened into the amphitheater and the hoodoos stood all around them like a crowd that had stopped mid-motion. A mule deer watched them from the shade under a pine and went back to chewing. They walked the flat stretch toward the two bridges without either of them deciding to.

The lookout came up on the left, a wide ledge of bare rock with no rail. Bella walked straight out onto it and stood at the edge with her arms crossed, looking down the length of the canyon as the light went from orange to copper. Wade stopped ten feet back and gave her the space. He had gotten good at giving her space, five years of practice, and it occurred to him that this was maybe the whole problem stated plainly.

The heat down in the bowl of the canyon was heavier than up top. It sat on them like a blanket. Bella looked at the hoodoos and then at the far rim and then she reached down and undid the top button of her shirt. Then the second. She fanned the fabric open and closed it a couple of times, not caring who was on the trail, and Wade watched the column of her throat go shiny with sweat and could not find one useful word.

"It's a furnace down here," she said.

"Yeah."

"This is where you say something, Wade. It's been quiet for twenty minutes and now I'm standing at a cliff and you're staring and it's making me feel like an exhibit."

"I'm sorry. You just, the light is..." He ran out. "There's no light like this anywhere I've lived."

She turned around. The third button was undone now too, and the shadow between her breasts was the same copper as the rock. "Come stand at the edge with me. I don't like being out here alone even though I'd never say that to anyone but you."

He walked out. The drop below was maybe a hundred feet of stacked stone. He stood next to her, close enough that their arms touched, and neither of them moved off. The canyon made a low sound, wind moving through the slots, like a building settling. Somewhere above them a tourist said something in a language Wade didn't know and laughed.

"I used to plan hikes for us," Bella said. "Back then. I had a list in my phone. This one was on it. That's why I stopped up there just now, my legs did it without me."

"I didn't know that."

"There's a lot you didn't know, because there was a lot I didn't say." She looked down at the drop. "Okay. Enough. I want to get back before I have to do this whole trail in the dark."

They climbed out slower than they came down. By the time they reached the campground the sky was purple and the first stars were out over the rim. Wade got the fire going with the last of the daylight and Bella dragged