Obsession (Explicitly Yours 4)

17

Arizona had stretched-cotton clouds, blue skies and long-fingered cacti. Lola stuck her left arm out the window, opening her hand against the dry, mild air. It was cooler now that she’d passed Phoenix, and the desert was changing from sand to brittle grass, shrubs and trees.

She’d reached Tucson thinking it would be the last night of her road trip. Los Angeles was only seven or eight hours from there. But in the motel the night before, she’d lain on a hard-mattress bed, staring up at a dark ceiling, insomnia an overzealous friend. She didn’t even know where she’d stop and park her car once she got home. That thought’d made her body heavy on the bed, as if she might risk driving right through the city if she didn’t figure it out soon.

Back when she’d had nothing to lose, it’d been easy to slide behind the bar of Hey Joe. To insert herself into Johnny’s life one toiletry at a time. To slip beside him in his bed. Things weren’t so clear now. She only knew what she didn’t want for herself or her baby—a life where things happened to her. She was capable of taking charge now. That was what she’d gained by choosing herself and driving away from something she loved.

She’d lain awake most of the night, memories of Beau gum-stuck to her no matter how hard she tried to clean them away. How he focused when he shaved. He didn’t make coffee for himself, but he liked to leave her a fresh pot on the mornings he didn’t see her, his version of a love note on his pillow. It was always too strong, the coffee. But what she remembered as clearly as those little things was the waiting. For the end. For him to come home. If Lola wasn’t the woman Beau would leave work early for, then one didn’t exist. By now, he would know it too, what he’d given up to stay on top.

Sometimes, though, he’d tried to make it right—most notably the evening they’d had coffee in his den and talked until the near dawn. After replaying that night’s conversation about travel, she’d decided there’d be one more stop on her trip. It would be a way to pay homage to her time with Beau—and a place to seek answers. The earth had bottomed out from under her, but she was climbing her way back up. Where better to end this trip than a rift so deep, it could never be repaired?

Lola arrived at the Grand Canyon in the late afternoon. She waited in a line of cars to pay the entrance fee. The only money she carried now was a couple hundred dollars divided between her wallet and her suitcase. The rest was in a bank where it belonged. She passed through the cabin-esque, log-walled entrance, and drove to the parking lots. She circled them for fifteen minutes, hitting her brakes now and then for tourists in bunched-up socks and cameras around their necks. Everybody was arriving. Nobody seemed to be leaving.

Finally, she parked and got out, stretching her arms. The clear, cool sky was stark against its russet surroundings. A bus stopped at the curb of the Visitor’s Center and a group spilled out. They wore more layers than she did and talked loudly about the impending sunset. She shoved her hands in her hoodie pockets and tried to weave through people, but they kept stopping to take pictures before they’d even made it to the canyon. She looped wide around the swarm. What she wouldn’t miss about traveling was the crowds, lines, limited parking. People on top of people at every attraction.

She stopped first at the busiest spot, a fenced overlook. She leaned on a railing, gazing into the mouth of the canyon, wide open and the color of a bruise. It gave her a thrill. She scanned the canyon walls, a rust-rainbow of beiges that morphed into earthy purples and pinks as the sun lowered.

A man asked her to move out of a picture he was taking of his wife. Lola left to find a more secluded spot, her tennis shoes crunching along the path. Only Mather Point, where she’d just stood, was enclosed. The rest was open, the canyon ready to swallow anyone who might misstep. She walked the rim, the crowd thinning, and spotted a cliff where she could be alone.

She climbed off the path, down between two boulders. A whitewashed rock jutted out into the canyon and came to a square point. The thought of standing on the edge made her heart skip, but she hadn’t come all this way to live life in the curtains. With slow, careful steps, she walked to the ledge. It was a straight drop down. Being so far up was physical, her stomach and legs prickling like being stabbed by hundreds of tiny pins. As a teenager, she’d get high trying to feel something akin to this. She shivered with a breeze, the hair on the back of her neck waking up.

“I’m ready for some answers,” she said out loud, her words expanding into nothing. She felt, inside, like the valley—deep, dangerous, beautiful. She had no idea how to be a mother. She didn’t take it lightly, that responsibility, and it scared her. She needed to know how one night could’ve led to all this. One night, she’d looked over her shoulder and found Beau. One night, they hadn’t used prot

ection. “I don’t know if I can do this by myself.”

Nothing happened. The canyon was still. She wasn’t going to find answers here. They were inside her, but they’d only come with time. She closed her eyes to take a mental picture, the wind light in her hair. She told herself she wasn’t alone, that as much as it’d been forced on her, she’d also chosen this path. She wouldn’t have been happy in that life with Beau, never having healed that wound he’d left, always being second place to his money.

That was where she stood, alone but steeped in hard-won peace, when he spoke from behind her.

“So this is where it ends.”

18

Lola opened her eyes abruptly, her peacefulness shattering. Beau was so unexpected that her heart doubled in size and speed, fat and swollen, clambering up into her throat like a live fish trying to escape. She knew that voice, that unforgiving tone, as surely as she knew what would happen if she were to take one step forward.

“Turn the fuck around,” Beau said.

The deeply-orange sun crested from behind a cloud, blinding her. She turned her head to the side, Beau in her peripheral vision. Closer than he should be. There was no one person she wanted to see least and most in that moment. She didn’t want to explain herself, but she needed him to understand.

“Look me in the eye,” he said. “You owe me that much.”

She couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was bad timing, being so close to the edge, vulnerable and unprepared for him. This wasn’t on her terms like it was supposed to be.

But with the gravelly chew of his shoes, she turned quickly. She shielded her eyes, his shadow black and nebulous, blinking away the sun’s neon imprint. “Wait,” she said.

He’d already stopped, his feet apart, almost aggressively so. It reminded her of the beginning, the way he’d stood that first night on the Sunset Strip sidewalk, intruding on her moment alone. Just like then, he was perfectly put together in his suit, his dress shirt tucked in, his navy tie straight. Only his pants were wrinkled across the front, as if he’d been sitting in them for a long time. The day’s last light illuminated his brown hair gold.