by Zary Fekete<\/p>\n
Nora was surprised by the green.<\/p>\n
From the road the hills had looked dry\u2026\u00a0 grasses shaved short and pale as old rope\u2026 but once they parked and walked toward the trees, the color gathered and thickened, pulling in the light. It wasn\u2019t a brightness so much as a concentration; the kind of green that seems older than any paint has managed to catch.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on, then,\u201d Roger said, and grinned at her like they were in on a joke. He shut the car door with a clean, practiced push, patted his pocket to check for the keys, and turned toward the path. The guidebook stuck out of his back pocket like a tongue.<\/p>\n
She shouldered her little canvas bag and followed. \u201cHow far again?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot much. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.\u201d He tapped the guidebook. \u201cThere\u2019s a lookout with a rail. The caption said you\u2019ll know you\u2019re close from the noise alone.\u201d He wiggled his eyebrows. \u201cTerrific noise.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFun,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
They entered the trees and, as if rehearsed, every outside thing\u2026 the glare off the hood, the tick of the cooling engine, the long, bleached field\u2026 fell away. Even their footsteps turned soft. The earth here remembered rain. Ferns lounged their fronds over the dirt path like someone\u2019s sleeves left to dry. A ribbon of sunlight moved and slid with the breeze. She thought, briefly, of an aquarium she\u2019d once seen as a child, a glass tank with a greenish lamp and a little castle inside that gathered algae along its turrets. Even the murk had been beautiful because it made the plastic look less fake.<\/p>\n
Roger broke off a slender branch and began to whip it gently across the brush as they walked, a motion that seemed more habit than need. Now and then he swiped at a spiderweb. \u201cIt\u2019ll be like nothing you\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d he said over his shoulder. \u201cYou can feel it in your chest\u2026 like a bass speaker, but cleaner.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCleaner,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The path dipped once between two outcrops and rose again into a shallow shoulder. Nora matched her breath to the tilt of the ground and, without thinking, counted fifteen steps and then fifteen more. She wasn\u2019t in bad shape; she had simply learned that walking felt easier if she gave it a rhythm first and only afterward let herself be on the walk.<\/p>\n
Somewhere a woodpecker worked at a hollow trunk. The tapping fell into place with her counting. She imagined the bird wearing a little black apron, checking off its list.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019s the knee?\u201d Roger asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cFine,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
He nodded. \u201cWe\u2019ll be there before you feel any of it. And then we can just stand and take it in. The force. The work that went into it. Remember those photos of the Hoover?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember the hats,\u201d she said. \u201cAll those hats like white insects along the cable.\u201d<\/p>\n
He laughed. \u201cExactly.\u201d<\/p>\n
A cloud passed over the sun and the green pulled itself closer around them. The air cooled by a breath. She slowed without intending to and let her hand skim the tips of a wide-leafed plant as they moved. There was grit under her fingernails from this morning\u2019s hotel coffee cup; she\u2019d pried off the little plastic pull tab and it had slipped and skittered and she\u2019d fished it out of the trash with two fingers rather than leave it there to be sticky forever. The world rewarded small rescues, she believed, even if only she noticed.<\/p>\n
They stepped into a little clearing where the path widened to let water cross in heavy rain. Now it was dry\u2026 the stones bright-skinned and freckled with lichen. In the middle of the clearing, just where the path narrowed again, a lone dandelion had pressed itself through a crease in the packed dirt. It wore one half of its seed globe like a tilted crown. The other half had been crushed flat against the ground, a smudge of white bristles and dust.<\/p>\n
Nora paused. Roger kept going, the branch flicking. She crouched and peered at the dandelion. The remaining seeds held like a jaw\u2019s teeth, determined first and then resigned. She cupped her palm near and blew. Three or four let go. Their drift was not elegant\u2026 they bumped a bit and jittered the way clumsy swimmers do\u2026 but she watched them with a private hope as if watching was the same as helping. When they had gone as far as they could stand, she pinched the stem low and lifted the flower. The crushed half came up as a pale print. The stem gave a faint squeak where it pulled free.<\/p>\n
She stood and slipped the dandelion into her bag, propped between her wallet and a folded grocery receipt where she\u2019d scribbled a list but then ignored it, buying peaches and eggs and, for reasons that had made sense at the time, two lemon-scented sponges.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlmost there,\u201d Roger called back. \u201cStrange there\u2019s no sound yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe it hides until the last minute,\u201d she said, but he had already turned forward again.<\/p>\n
She tried to remember the last time she and Roger had traveled this far alone. His work took him on trips that felt like a list of airports; when she joined, she wanted a thing that wasn\u2019t a terminal to place the memory in. He liked bridges and machines. He liked diagrams. He could stand for a long time in front of a cross-section and tell her the names of things\u2026 penstock, spillway, abutment\u2026 until the words themselves felt like small objects she could line up on a windowsill and dust now and then.<\/p>\n
When they first met, he\u2019d taken her to an overlook to watch trains enter and leave a junction. She\u2019d thought she should be bored by the waiting, but his attention made a shape out of it; his pleasure at the first light far down the track, his quickening as the sound came, the rumble underfoot. She had felt then that loving someone might be a form of translation\u2026 the world rewritten in their grammar and, if you were lucky, some of it sticking.<\/p>\n
The path brightened and thinned. The leaves got smaller and the trees stepped farther apart. Roger\u2019s pace quickened with the light. He checked his watch, as if measuring how long it took to arrive could be added to the list of what they had accomplished. He was, she knew, the sort of person who finished books he disliked because he had started them. She was the sort who put a book down at the first page, the last page, or somewhere in the middle if the air outside the book felt more needed.<\/p>\n
A faint wind came off the open and brought with it a dry smell like masonry warming. For no reason she could name, her stomach lifted, a small elevator in an old building catching at the third floor.<\/p>\n
Then they stepped out of the trees and stopped.<\/p>\n
It was there, enormous and pale in the sun: a wall of poured stone sunlight, the curve of it cupping the valley like a hand. She felt the heat coming off it even at this distance. The lookout platform lay ahead\u2014just a rail and a wooden sign with a faded diagram and a prohibition about climbing. The valley opened in both directions in a soft, dizzying U. It felt at first like the ocean might be on the other side of the wall, just past it, the blue of it pressing to come through.<\/p>\n
But there was no sound.<\/p>\n
Where the sluice gates should have roared and hammered, where the curtains of water should have flung themselves down and atomized into a steady white roar that would lift your hair and put pressure in your chest\u2026 there was nothing. A thin skein of water hissed somewhere far along the stone, the way a kettle hisses a second before it\u2019s truly boiling. It drew a faint, wavering line down the dam\u2019s side, a pencil stroke that did not reach the bottom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d Roger said. He scratched the crown of his head and then lowered his hand as if embarrassed to be caught doing it. \u201cThat\u2019s not right.\u201d<\/p>\n
They walked to the rail. There was a map bolted under Plexiglas that showed the lake above and the river below. The lake was a blue shape like a spoon. The river wore a different icon, more thread than road. Someone had carved initials into the wooden rail at hip height. Someone else had tried to sand them away and then given up.<\/p>\n
A shutter clicked. They turned. A man stood with one foot on a rock and one foot on the dirt as if warming up for a minor sprint. The camera around his neck looked heavy enough to anchor a boat. He wore a hat with a brim that wobbled at the edges like a pie crust.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know what happened?\u201d Roger asked him. It came out louder than usual, like he\u2019d had to make his voice fill the space where the noise should have been. \u201cWhere\u2019s the water?\u201d<\/p>\n
The man lowered the camera and squinted toward the wall. \u201cUpstream,\u201d he said. \u201cRockfall. The ranger I spoke to said a landslide came down last week and sat right in the throat of it, like a cork. It\u2019ll clear eventually, but for now\u2026 \u201d He held out his hands at the empty air. \u201cNo song.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo song,\u201d Roger said, and nodded, as if the phrase had insulted his profession. He looked down at the diagram, up at the wall, then back at the sign as if trying to find a clause he\u2019d missed. \u201cWe drove two hours,\u201d he said, politely, to the man. \u201cThe guidebook said\u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t reprint these things every week,\u201d the man said. \u201cAnd besides, if you stand still enough, you can hear the small part that got through.\u201d He pointed. \u201cThere.\u201d<\/p>\n
They listened. The sound, once he had given it a direction, gathered itself out of the air\u2026 a faint sizzle, almost a whisper, like pouring very slowly from a glass that has a chip in it. Nora set her elbow on the rail and rested her chin in the cradle of her hand. She saw, far across the face, a darker, undried path where the water had marked its wish. A swallow cut a tight curve against the stone and vanished into a seam somewhere near the top. She looked for plants and found them\u2026 tufts of something like grass where dust had lodged, and a brave weed sprouting from a shallow crack that must have filled with grit and dared a root. Even here, on a wall built against the idea of seepage, something tested and then believed.<\/p>\n
Roger sighed. \u201cWaste of effort,\u201d he said, no one\u2019s fault, and then, in case it had sounded meaner than he meant, \u201cNot the dam. I mean this trip. Wrong week to come.\u201d<\/p>\n
The photographer lifted the camera again and took a shot with a soft, satisfied sound, a human noise that did, for a moment, make a small replacement for the missing thunder. Then he tipped his hat, which made its pie-crust brim wobble again, and moved along the rail.<\/p>\n
They stood a while longer. Roger read everything on the sign twice, possibly in hopes that the letters would concede something, then traced the outline of the lake with a finger as if from memory he might fill it.<\/p>\n
\u201cShall we?\u201d he said at last.<\/p>\n
\u201cSure,\u201d Nora said. \u201cLet\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time they reached the car, Roger had calmed down, the particular disappointment scrolled off and filed. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, \u201cWell, there\u2019s that done,\u201d as if they had checked a box, which, in a way, they had.<\/p>\n
He started the car. She turned her head back toward the forest. Then she reached into her bag and found the dandelion. The unbroken half of its globe had held together, though the edges were less crisp now\u2026 no perfect spheres, only a bit of fluff with a mathematics of its own. She turned the stem once to feel its small squeak, then tucked it behind her ear.<\/p>\n
She kept her face turned away and smiled, the kind of smile that does not announce itself to the person beside you because it is addressed to something else entirely. The car eased forward. The road took them back the way they had come, past the sign with the arrow, past the field with the low, obedient grass, past the long treeline where the green gathered itself and made a room. In the rearview, the hills looked dry again, their color uncommitted, as if none of it had happened.<\/p>\n
She touched the dandelion once with a fingertip to make sure it stayed and said, mostly to the air between her and the window, \u201cThat was beautiful,\u201d and meant it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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