The Nature of Disappearing

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

Sometimes, though, there are John Thomases: entitled jerks who are simply checking off a locale from a list someone posted on the internet. People who don’t really love that feeling, how the rest of the world can blur and disappear when you are on the water, but who are after something else, something less. And today is one of those days.

If there’s one thing her twenty-eight years have taught her, it’s that there are people in this world who inspire loyalty and devotion, and there are people who are forgettable and leavable. She is the latter.

It has always felt strange to her, the way certain people were so connected, and how, in the end, it made everything in life easier. Tyler wasn’t even rich, not like Janessa, anyway, but still—he knew the right people. A quick phone call, a message. How many times had she watched either of them fix a problem that would’ve taken Emlyn days to resolve, with the smallest gesture of effort, like waving a wand.

She pulled the other glove over her gnarled hand. “Bears, cougars. I guess. But, truth is, I always found the most dangerous animal of all—” She paused here, holding Emlyn’s eye. “—that’s got to be the two-legged kind.”

Martin Reservoir is enormous, nearly four thousand acres in size and spanning two counties.

“I’m really glad you’re here,” Tyler says. “You were the first person I wanted to call.” He swerves to avoid a pothole, and then, turning to look at her, adds, “You’re always the first person I want to call.”

She looks at the piece of paper one last time before placing it back on the nightstand. The final item on Janessa’s list: Run.

She can’t afford one herself, not the unit or the monthly subscription fee, but she knows how they work. You hit the SOS button, the monitoring channels receive your distress call with your coordinates. The process is a little convoluted, but the bottom line is that it’s a surefire way to know that if you do get into trouble out in the wild, you will get help.

There are so many things she holds tight to herself, wounds that tingle and corrode every relationship, and life is so much easier when you keep your pain hidden beneath a shiny veneer.

These are not mistakes, Emlyn realizes. These are not accidents or experiments. There is a fixed snare; there is a squirrel noose. And, almost unbelievably, the use of animal sinew. Whoever did this—they were no amateur. They were knowledgeable and skilled. An expert, a craftsman.

Emlyn is inferior to Janessa, in every way. She knows this and accepts it without qualms because it is foundational not only to their relationship, but to all friendships among women. At least as Emlyn understands them. In every friendship, there is always a prettier one, a flirtier one, a more likable one of the two. If they meet two guys at the bar, the better-looking one chooses Janessa, every time.

“Fine, I won’t get into Tyler’s past. That’s his story to tell. What I’m saying is that at some point he’ll … move beyond you. You’ll no longer be enough.” Janessa’s words set fire to every emotional pain receptor in Emlyn’s body. They strike up every insecurity, light up every ugly thing about herself she has ever believed. Is there any other thing her friend could’ve said that would be more heartbreaking? “I won’t be enough,” she whispers, and when she says it aloud, she hears it more as a statement than a question.

So many unfortunate facts, so many vexing statistics, and as they trek back to the traps, Emlyn thinks of all of them. That if a man wants to overpower a woman, he usually can. That sometimes, it only takes one tiny mistake to put a whole party in danger. That eighty-five percent of people who go missing in the wilderness are found in the first twelve hours. Ninety-seven percent in the first twenty-four.

“‘Aerial spoor.’

Miraculously, they make it to the truck. She drives him back through the curves and dips of Route 15, to a clinic in Silver City. They helicopter him to the nearest hospital, where a surgeon pieces Tyler’s leg back together with titanium plates and screws. No infection, another miracle. The surgeon assures her she has saved his life. She doesn’t know then, nine months into her relationship with Tyler, that he started on painkillers when he was sixteen, a “gift” from a buddy, at the time just another fix for him. She doesn’t know that he overdosed at seventeen, was in rehab at eighteen, then also at twenty, and at twenty-one. That oxycodone has always been his drug of choice. That there, deep in the Gila Wilderness, she has reignited the addiction that held him in its claws for years before she met him.

He holds out a copy of The Carrying. “Ada Limón’s new collection. You like her, right?” She takes The Carrying. She’s already read this book. Tyler bought it for her and gave it to her last month, for her birthday.

A line spins to her: “Sometimes, he drowns. / Sometimes, we drown together.”

The real agony of this new life of hers is not signing Tyler into rehab or hearing an ambulance wail as it carts him away. It’s not watching him lie and disappear and keep her up late into the night, worried sick, though those things, of course, are heartbreaking. The real agony, she now understands, is this. It’s good things—the book of poems, the sandwich, both kind and thoughtful—speckled with carnage. It’s seeing someone you love splinter away from you, shard by shard. Knowing there are parts of him left, but never being sure just how much, and at what point a person is so far gone that you won’t ever really get him back.

She tries to force from her mind a dozen memories that swarm her. Tyler not coming to pick her up after her spin class at the YMCA; Tyler with a cut hand, bleeding on a sandwich; Tyler forgetting their date at a coffee shop. But also Tyler pale and unconscious on the bathroom floor, the paramedics assessing his vitals as she stands in her nightgown in the corner. Tyler slumped in the back seat as Emlyn drives him off to rehab. The forgetfulness, the mood swings, the lies. Time shuffled away from him; he became someone else.

Memories of her father swim to her. Those kind blue eyes, the wrinkles at the corners. The skin leathered from too much sun. She had been his world, hadn’t she? And yet—he had left. He promised it wasn’t about her; this was adult stuff between him and her mother. He would keep in touch, he would still see her. And he had, for a while. But he’d also moved on.

“But it’s in the wilderness that you grow,”

THE THING IS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, HOW CAN A BODY WITHSTAND THIS? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. —Ellen Bass

But, though everything hurts, and nothing makes sense, a different, better part of her understands: this is not how she wants this to end. Yes, she was defending herself. Yes, he was trying to kill her, but—she doesn’t want Bush to die at her hands. Monster or not, she doesn’t want that on her conscience. That’s not who she is.

oh the cliche