Lost and Found Under the Stars

The plane landed in Albuquerque a little after two in the afternoon, and I rented a car and drove north for three hours through country that got prettier and emptier the farther I went, red dirt and piñon trees and sky so big it made me feel like I'd been living in a shoebox my whole life. I'm Clara Sharpe, I'm thirty-five years old, I run a catering business out of Portland, Oregon, and up until that afternoon I had never once laid eyes on Erika Robbins in person, which is a strange thing to say about a woman you've been half in love with for six years.

We met on a forum for people who cook too much, of all things, and it turned into phone calls, and the phone calls turned into these long late-night things where we'd talk until one of us fell asleep with the phone still on, her on the East Coast and me on the West, six years of that. She was a lab tech at a diagnostic lab, thirty-four years old, and before that she'd been a field medic overseas, which she talked about the way other people talk about a summer job they didn't love. She'd moved out to northern New Mexico for a posting at a lab near a base, and when she said come visit, come hike with me, I bought the ticket before she finished the sentence.

So there I was, pulling into a dirt lot at a ranger station in the high desert at almost six in the evening, sun getting low and orange over the junipers, my phone showing one bar that I knew was a lie. The station was a low adobe building with a flagpole and a faded sign, and a man came out onto the porch wiping his hands on a rag, tall, gray coming in at his temples, looking like he'd been expecting somebody and not sure it was me.

"You the friend?" he called out. "Clara?"

"That's me," I said, getting out of the car with my legs stiff from the drive. "And you must be Levi. Erika's told me exactly one thing about you, which is that you're her neighbor and you know everything about everything out here."

He laughed at that, a easy laugh, and came down the steps to shake my hand. Levi Graham, forty-two, supervisor of the whole station, and I got the feeling within about ten seconds that he was the kind of man who'd already decided he liked me, which was fine, because I needed somebody to like me right then, my nerves were doing something stupid in my chest. "She's late," he said. "She's always late. She'll come skidding in here talking about a broken centrifuge or a lost form, you'll see."

And sure enough, about four minutes later a gray SUV came up the dirt road faster than anybody ought to drive a dirt road, and it parked crooked, and Erika got out of it already talking. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, there was a shipment that came in wrong at the lab and I could not leave until someone else signed for it, and then I hit every piece of traffic that exists in a county that doesn't have traffic." She was smaller than I'd pictured and taller than I'd feared, if that makes any sense, with her hair pulled back and sun on her face, and she stopped dead about six feet from me and just looked.

"Hi," I said. My voice came out weird, higher than I meant.

"Hi yourself," she said. "God, Clara, you're actually real!"

Then we were hugging, and I want to tell you that I behaved like a normal adult during that hug, but the truth is the second her arms went around me something went through me like a current, head to toe, and I held on maybe two seconds longer than a friend hug lasts and she held on just as long, and when we pulled back neither of us said anything smart or clever, which for the two of us was a first. Six years of being smooth on the phone and there we stood, struck dumb by an actual body to hold onto.

Levi cleared his throat from the porch, kind of grinning, and said, "Well, all right then," and that broke the spell and we all laughed, embarrassed the way you get when a stranger catches something true.

He went inside and came back out with a green camping stove and a folded map and handed them over to Erika like he was handing over a baby. "Now listen, you two. This stove works, I checked it this morning. There's water in the jug in your pack already. The trail to the campground is marked, blue blazes on the trees, takes about an hour and a half easy. You camp at the stone shelter by the fire ring, you build a fire in the ring and nowhere else, and you're back by ten tomorrow so I don't send anybody looking."

"Yes sir," Erika said, giving him a little salute, and he snorted at her.

He turned to me then and shook his head, still grinning. "Between the two of you I've got a former medic who hasn't camped since her twenties and a caterer who I'd bet money has never slept outside a building in her life. Am I close?"

"He's close," I admitted. "I've never slept outside a building, period. I camped in my backyard once when I was little and my mom made me come in at ten because I got scared."

Both of them laughed at me, and I laughed too, because it was true and because I was too happy standing in that dirt lot to care. Erika bumped her shoulder against mine, and even through my jacket that little bump went right down my spine, and I thought, oh, this is going to be a problem, this whole weekend is going to be a beautiful problem.

We loaded my duffel into her SUV, said goodbye to Levi, who told us one more time about the blue blazes and made Erika repeat it back to him like she was reciting homework, and we drove ten minutes up a washboard road to the trailhead, where there was a wooden sign and a gate and nothing else for miles in any direction. The air smelled like sage and dust and sun-warmed juniper, and I stood there a minute just breathing it, because in Portland I smell rain and coffee and car exhaust and that is the entire menu.

"Ready?" she asked, adjusting the straps on her pack, and she'd gotten tan since the last time I'd seen a photo of her, and there was a new scar on her forearm I wanted to ask about, and her boots were broken in and mine were stiff and new, and I was so glad to be standing next to her that I could hardly stand it.

"Born ready," I said. "Which is a lie. I'm wearing brand new hiking socks I bought at an airport."

"There's no shame in airport socks," she said, solemn as a judge. "Some of the finest people I've known wore airport socks."

The trail started out easy, wide and sandy, winding through the piñon and juniper with the dry wash off to our left, all pale stones and cracked mud. We talked the way we always talked, easy and quick, finishing each other's complaints, and it struck me that six years of phone calls had somehow prepared us for walking side by side, that her voice was the same at arm's length as it was from three thousand miles.

Maybe forty minutes in we came to a fork, and there was a post there with an old sign on it, sun-bleached and leaning, and Erika stopped and squinted at it and put her hands on her hips.

"Okay," she said. "Left says campground, one mile. Right says, I think, canyon, and then some word I can't read."

"Left, then," I said.

"Left, obviously," she agreed, and then she turned right.

I stood there and watched her take three steps down the right-hand trail before I said, "Erika. Erika. You're going the wrong way with tremendous confidence."

She stopped and looked back at me, and then at the sign, and then at the trail she'd already started down, and she laughed until she had to put her hand on her knee. "Six years of medical training," she wheezed, "and I cannot read a sign in my own county. Well, come on, this way's shadier anyway."

And because I'd been in love with her for six years and had no sense where she was concerned, I followed her, right past that sign, down into a dry canyon that got quieter and redder and prettier with every step, and I even made a joke about it, I said, "Well, this is what I get for trusting the wrong person," and she threw a pinecone at me and said that trusting her had worked out fine for six years running, and the crazy part is I believed her.

The canyon trail kept going and going, and at some point I noticed the light had changed, gone all amber and long, and the walls of the canyon were glowing red like somebody had turned up a knob somewhere. I was busy looking at that and didn't notice Erika had stopped until I nearly walked into her backpack.

"Clara," she said, in the flat voice of a woman delivering bad news. "The trail just ended."

"What do you mean it ended. Trails don't end. Trails go places."

"Well, this one disagrees." She stepped aside so I could see, and sure enough, the path just quit, folded into a wall of rock and brush like it had never had anywhere to be. "I think we took the canyon trail after all. Or the canyon trail took us. Either way, the campground is not down here."

I looked at my watch and did the math, and the math was ugly. We'd been walking over an hour, mostly the wrong direction, and the sun was already touching the top of the mesa to the west, sliding down it like a coin going into a pocket. "Okay," I said, in the calm voice I use when a wedding cake collapses two hours before the reception. "Okay. We turn around, we walk an hour back, it'll be dark by then."

"Mostly dark," she said. "And I don't love navigating that canyon in the dark when I can barely read signs in daylight."

"So what, we camp here?"

She turned in a slow circle, hands on her hips, doing whatever it is medic-brain does, assessing. There was a flat sandy stretch near the wash, and a big overhang of rock, and enough dead juniper branches around to furnish a small nation. "Actually, yeah," she said. "We camp here. We're not lost lost, we know exactly where the trailhead is, we're just going to be a night later than planned. Levi knows roughly where we went. We'll be fine."

"Fine," I said, and my voice cracked on it like a rusty gate, and she laughed at me and put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I got through it.

She pulled out her phone to text Levi anyway, just to be thorough, and held it up and waved it around like a flag. Nothing. She climbed up on a rock and held it higher. Nothing. "No signal," she reported. "Which I figured. This canyon is a dead zone." My phone was the same, not that I expected better, since I had one bar of battery and a screen full of photos of juniper berries I'd apparently been taking for fun.

Then the stove. Levi had lent us this green camping stove, a little two-burner thing, and Erika set it up on a flat rock all businesslike, screwed the canister in, turned the knob, and clicked the igniter. Click click click. Nothing. She clicked about thirty more times, tried a second knob, swore under her breath in a way that was honestly kind of exciting, and then turned the whole thing over and looked at the bottom like the answer would be written there.

"Levi is going to hear about this," she said. "He swore it worked."

"Maybe it needs, I don't know, encouragement?"

"It needs to not be broken, is what it needs." She put it down and wiped her hands on her jeans. "Fine. We've got food that doesn't need cooking, we've got water, and we've got a lighter, so we'll do it the old way. Fire. I can build a fire, I built them in places you wouldn't believe."

So we gathered twigs and dry juniper bark while the light died out of the sky, and she stacked it all with these careful hands, and on the third try the lighter caught and the little fire took and grew, and I swear I have never in my life been prouder of anything, and I didn't even build it, I just watched her do it. We laid out her sleeping bags and a blanket on the sand under the rock overhang, and we sat down close together, shoulder to shoulder, because the desert gets cold fast once the sun quits, and the fire felt miraculous in its smallness.

The stars came out slow at first and then all at once, like somebody spilled them, more stars than I'd ever seen in my life, and I couldn't stop looking