One day she didn’t walk and instead hopped a train, the scenic railway that ran on tracks once used to haul supplies and passengers up to the mines of Jerome. She made her way through the vintage cars, back and forth, engine to caboose, past elbowy tourists wielding camera phones; she paused to lean on the open trolley railing, taking in the slopes tufted with shrub oak and junipers, the giant mining slag heap pushing through its rusted containment fence like a hernia. The craggy red canyon walls were so close on one winding pass, she could almost reach out and touch the rock. Other days, she hopped in the car, covered now with rain-spattered dust and cat prints, and drove to nearby destinations to walk—Sedona, Jerome, even once to Flagstaff. On her thirty-seventh birthday, she walked up the red, sandpapery sides of Bell Rock, where, according to Maud, thousands of nitwits once gathered to wait for the mothership—“Harmonic convergence my ass!” Maud had shouted, her eyes glinting. Laura sat at the top of the rock and tried to call her parents, who hadn’t called yet. They’d never forgotten her birthday before. She didn’t leave a message; instead, she found a sharp gray stone and scratched the sandstone into a fine red powder. As if she were playing dress-up, she smoothed the powder on her cheeks like blusher, rubbed it into her temples and jawline and the backs of her hands. In Jerome, on a mountain made of Precambrian rock, the abandoned open pit mine in the side like an open wound, she walked up long narrow stairs and rattled the bars of an old jail cell and ate a grilled cheese in a converted brothel. When she caught a glimpse of herself in a window—stringy and tanned, collarbones like a scythe—she stopped and thought, And who the hell are you? Standing there in your stupid hat, as if you have all the time in the world.
Back in Sycamore, she walked a dirt path the town had cut along the river, where fluffy cottonwood seeds floated across her vision and stuck to her sweaty forearms. Shrubs and low trees crowded the banks and obscured her view of the river, but on Sycamore Bridge, she could lean on the railing and take in the stretch of brownish-green water. She thought of the strong and lovely Crystal Pier, whose railings she’d leaned on throughout her life, watching the surfers and sky, salt and wind in her nose and eyes. Here all was still: the heat seemed to shimmer off the ground. The water meandered, sluggish, nothing like the relentless push and pull of the ocean, that enigmatic expanse with lurking fault lines and reefs, the tectonic scarred ridges of continental drift, the answers to the Earth’s beginnings. If the river’s surface rippled, she jumped—a harmless water snake? Or a water moccasin, a member of the pit viper family known to climb into people’s canoes?—but it was usually the fat twitching tail of a fish.
Usually she turned around at the bridge, but one morning she walked farther than normal, though she had drunk most of the melted ice she’d brought. The path curved beyond the bridge, and she wasn’t sure what waited around the bend. In the short distance, she could see rows of trees, which must belong to the pecan orchard she’d read about. Farther still were the curls of smoke from the cement factory on the far outskirts of town.
When she rounded the river’s bend, she was surprised to find a concave stretch of land on the path’s left side. She shielded her eyes. The surface, parched and scratched with fissures, had also been covered with stones in spiral patterns. On the far side was a pile of stones about the size of a small car and what appeared to be a wooden dock. She remembered then from her Internet research: this must have been the small lake that disappeared when a sinkhole opened up overnight. Arroyo Lake.
She walked around the lip of the old lake toward the dock. The cracked mud looked like map markings, a crisscross of boundary lines and highways, streams and county roads. She remembered reading that the Verde Valley had been an ancient freshwater lake, layers of limestone and mudstone and volcanic deposits. She climbed onto the wood dock and walked to the end. At the lowest point was a five-foot gash about the width of a tree trunk. Large, smooth stones curled around the hole, as if protecting it, and then spiraled upward along the sides.
From behind her, a voice called out, “Hello.”
Laura stifled a scream and turned around so fast she lost her balance, throwing her arms out to catch herself. A woman wearing a large yellow sun hat stood a few feet away, pushing a green wheelbarrow filled with stones.
“You scared me,” Laura said.
The woman shrugged but said nothing. At the pile of stones, she tipped the wheelbarrow until the rocks tumbled out and then leaned for a moment on the handles. She was short, her tanned arms and legs ropy with muscles. When the woman took off her hat and wiped her brow, Laura glimpsed a streak of purple dye in her fair hair, as well as a reddish-brown port-wine stain birthmark on the right side of her face, spreading along her cheek and jawline and down her neck. The woman was closer to her own age than she’d first thought.
Laura pointed at the stones in the old lake. “Is this yours? I mean, did you do all this?”
“No one comes here anymore,” the woman said. She turned around and pushed the wheelbarrow toward what Laura saw was a sloping ravine. Laura had read about these dry washes being carved by rains throughout the desert. They could be as wide as bedrooms or as narrow as hallways, the sides as short as porch railings or as tall as rooftops. During flash floods, walls of water gushed through, pushing tons of mud and sand, ripping out trees, and tumbling boulders. She’d clicked through to multiple stories about unsuspecting hikers, campers, and migrants killed in flash floods in and around washes like this one. Swept miles away, buried in mud or never found at all.
Laura followed the woman, who had climbed up the other side of the wash and was pushing the wheelbarrow along a well-worn path. A car whizzed past, and with a blink, Laura realized that the District was only a hundred feet or so from where she stood. She could see the sign for the Woodchute Motor Lodge, a flash at the intersection. She shook her head, disoriented.
“Hey!” Laura called out to the woman, although she wasn’t sure why.
The woman turned and looked at her.
Laura swept her arm at the space behind her. “It’s beautiful. What you’re making.”
The woman nodded and seemed to smile. “Nice hat,” she said.
Laura bent the brim of the visor and watched the woman disappear through the scrub. Then she stomped her way home past the snakes in the weeds, brushing at cobwebs that draped like bunting across the path. The rocks in her pockets clacked like marbles, and the sound gave her the shivers even as the sun blasted down.