The Distant Dead by Heather Young

Author:Heather Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

The next week Sal went to the Family Dollar with five twenties in his pocket. They didn’t have Nikes like Kip’s, but they had a pair that looked almost like Adidas, and were just as white.

Nora

There is no rise, no dip, and barely a curve in Interstate 80 as it pummels through a hundred miles of sage and saltbush between Lovelock and Reno. In the middle distance, salt flats shimmer as white as snow. Beyond them the land folds into hills, row upon row of mounds cloaked in sameness and wheat-colored grass, their backs as soft as sleeping cats in the sun.

If you lived in Lovelock, you’d know those hills by name. Your family would picnic at Rabbit Hole Springs. You’d ride your dirt bike down the Winnemucca Wash and hunt quail with your father in Seven Troughs. You’d remember summer nights drinking Colt 45s on Chocolate Butte, surrounded by stars. To you, those hills wouldn’t be guardrails along a road you couldn’t travel fast enough. They’d be Sundays after church, Saturday mornings at dawn, and Fridays at sunset. They’d be why you loved it here. When you loved it here.

Nora loved the hills because they quieted her mind. On bad days, when her father dipped into his liquor or his pain flared up, she could be a thousand feet above the Basin before the school was empty and have an hour of windswept vacancy before going home. She’d sit on the hood of her car and conjure the vanished Lake Lahontan, drawing it from the sand to drown Lovelock beneath five hundred feet of water, and she wouldn’t think about whether her father’s cough was getting worse, or how she’d pay for the physical therapy the doctor said he needed, or whether he’d be well, and Jeremy alive, if she hadn’t broken her promise to her mother. Up here, she was the woman she’d wanted to be when she was seventeen: far away, on an adventure through time.

On the first day of the school district’s spring break, eleven days after Adam Merkel died, Nora was parked below the Lovelock Indian Cave, where a nameless tribe who’d lived in the Basin two thousand years before the Paiute came had stored duck decoys made of woven tule and buried eight of their loved ones. The sky was streaked with clouds as frail as lace and the wind teased her hair. Far below, Interstate 80 was a silver thread in the sand.

An hour before, she’d reheated last night’s meat loaf and had lunch with her father in the camper.

“No hike today?” he’d asked. Usually she spent spring break hiking alone in the hills. His happiness at her unexpected company made her look away.

“Not today.”

He dipped a piece of meat loaf in ketchup. “I liked that boy you brought by.”

Of course he did. Sal had listened to his stories, and Nora’s father loved an audience. “Sal’s a nice kid,” Nora said.

“Isn’t he the one who found that teacher’s body?”

Nora was surprised he remembered that.

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