In those dropout days when I had nothing left to worship, I worshipped Cora. We met when she scolded me. It was my first shift at a shop that sold useless things to well-dressed thirty-somethings. The walls were lined with candles and incense and vases shaped like headless Greek goddesses. The air was a haze of clashing scents. I was making the rounds with a feather duster when she stopped me. “You have to dust the inside of the mugs,” she said. “That’s where the grime is, on the interior.” And because of how I was then, I nodded and smiled and did as she said. I was accustomed to being told what to do, sure of my own ineptitude. I resented Cora’s bossiness, but my life then had no structure. I requested all morning shifts because I knew those were hers.
We must have looked like children behind that antique register, enveloped in the urgency of our talk, pausing to gift wrap novelty onesies. But we felt ancient, washed-up, saw ourselves as pariahs in winged eyeliner and mulberry lipstick. Cora’s expulsion from college seemed more glamorous than mine. It had involved a series of medical leaves from the prestigious private university nearby. No mysterious madness had driven my failure. I had made it from my town in the mountains to the public flagship in the middle of the state. I’d fallen in love with a boy who didn’t want me; my gen-ed classes flummoxed me in their anonymity and irrelevance. I’d lost my scholarship; I’d lost my faith in God and love. I was twenty and I was searching. Cora was the first object of devotion I found.
She didn’t pine, or daydream, or stand alone on the edge of parties trying to come up with devastating observations. When she wanted to sleep with a man, she interrogated him. Each question she asked made her stand taller in her shimmering platform sandals. She was twenty-three and had figured out how to live.
“Why would I ever go back?” she said one Saturday, moving around her kitchen, making us margaritas. I sat on the peeling countertop, feet dangling. “I make enough money for rent and I have my freedom.”
I knew, from googling her name, that she had once been a piano prodigy of sorts, but I didn’t ask about wasted potential. Her apartment housed no musical instruments; it barely had furniture. Usually we hung out on a frameless futon mattress in the living room. Adrift on the vast white wall behind the futon was a thrifted needlepoint of a medieval monk; beside it was a photograph of Cora’s grandmother, who had taught Cora piano and drowned herself at sixty.
“I worry about my parents,” I found myself saying. I slid off the countertop and pressed the rims of two plastic cups into a plate of salt. “I always thought I’d become a lawyer and buy them a better house or something.”
“There’s nothing sinful about self-interest,” Cora said, and a weight in me lifted.
“I don’t want to be working at the shop when I’m fifty,” I said.
“Well, I won’t be working there,” she said. “You know I have my other prospects.”
I nodded. The drink was too strong. Cora’s prospects were various. She silk-screened thrifted shirts and sold them online. She wrote essays for rich college kids and taught swim lessons in the summer. I loved her lack of commitment, her refusal of cohesion. I didn’t know what freedom looked like and figured it could look like this.
That night she floated the idea of California.
“I have a car and a tent,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we just go?”
“They’d fire us at the shop,” I said.
“We’ll say we have the flu. That gives us a week at least.”
Once I’d agreed to California, she changed the plan and told me we were going to Craters of the Moon. “Some national park in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Idaho,” she said, waving a dismissive hand, like one destination was as good as any other, like every choice she made was arbitrary and delightful.
Her car was a thirdhand Buick that smelled like secondhand smoke. “Her charming death rattle,” Cora said whenever she turned the ignition. On the highway, we cranked the windows down and she threw butt after butt out her side.
She wouldn’t tell me the real reason her sights were set on Craters of the Moon. Whenever I asked, she made a joke of it. She pulled up pictures of the park on her phone. I scrolled through them as she hummed to the radio: mountains of volcanic ash, miles of underground caves, the whole landscape riddled, blasted, abandoned, like someone’s nightmare of extraterrestrial loneliness.
“I was a teenage goth,” she said. “So I’m drawn to all the, like, darkness.”
But there was something in her eyes that wasn’t a joke. I thought of Cora as a person too brave to keep secrets. But she was taking us to Craters of the Moon for a reason, and I hated that I couldn’t draw it out of her.
“I bet you were a hot goth,” I said.
“Yeah, I was. I was a goth slut and I regret nothing.”
She turned the busted radio all the way up.
It was over thirty-six hours from North Carolina to Idaho and we slept in shifts. We arrived in the late afternoon the following day. The campground was inside a young lava flow—the youngest in the park, a sign told us. We didn’t know what that meant. The ground was black and craggy. Other people’s tents and RVs dotted the horizon.
“Damn it,” Cora said as she shook out our tent. “Moths eat nylon?”
We gazed at the flaccid fabric, full of holes. Some were the size of cigarette burns, some the size of nickels.
“Should be fine as long as it doesn’t rain,” I said.
“Oh Bernadette, always Miss Practical Brain. What would I do without you?”
I liked that she needed me but squirmed under the nickname. I didn’t want to be practical. My mother was practical, and her practicality had made her into a nice pastor’s wife, spending weekends making casseroles for whoever in the congregation was mourning. She seemed to me all surface, never indicating what was underneath, allowing no access to her depths. The casseroles were meant to make everyone forget she had depths. Kindness sometimes seemed disgusting to me and I wanted no part of it.
“You would find someone else,” I said before I could think of something to say.
Cora stared. “It was a rhetorical question. I know you’re not going anywhere.”
“But I could,” I said, again without thinking, my face coloring at the sudden momentum of my careless tongue. The sun was setting, making the ground darker, the sagebrush backlit by a band of prehistoric orange.
“Well, I have the car keys, don’t I?” said Cora, smiling like we were just doing a bit. She passed me the end of the tent pole and told me how to latch it. Of course I knew how; every childhood vacation of mine had been a camping trip.
Two sites down, a man emerged from an RV, cigarette in hand. He crossed one ankle over the other, leaned against the RV, looked in our direction. From this distance I couldn’t tell if he was young or old, if I should be attracted or afraid. He was tall and lean, and then Cora looked up and saw him.
“Only a certain kind of man can pull off cowboy boots,” she said. I’d admired them, too: the scuffed leather against black rock like a half-healed wound.
We were so tired that we curled up in the tent before it was fully dark. The still-setting sun cast slender needles through the moth holes, and eventually we could see snippets of deep black sky dusted with stars. Cora was big spoon and kissed the nape of my neck. I turned to face her and kissed her mouth because I wanted to show I was bold, too. To my surprise, her mouth was just a mouth: lips chapped and thin, breath cigarette-stale. Disappointment hit me, fast and sharp; I had wanted to be swept away. When I pulled back, her eyes were inscrutable.
“Wouldn’t it be easy if it was like that for us?” she said. “If it was simple? But that’s not how it is, is it?”
I nodded and pressed my forehead to hers. Soon I was asleep. When the cry of some animal woke me a few hours later, she was gone. I pressed my eye to one of the holes and was relieved to see her sitting cross-legged in the soft ash, her back to me. Sleep drew me in, and by morning she was there again, awake and tousle-haired beside me.
While we ate our granola-bar breakfast, it started to rain. The man in cowboy boots was out again. He motioned us under the awning of his RV. He looked old to me, maybe in his late thirties. I could hear a woman scolding children within, and that made me feel safe enough to stand beside him.
“That is one ragged-ass tent,” he said. His rain gear looked like it was meant for hunting—olive-colored and baggy. I thought of my father and brother returning home, triumphant with venison, resplendent with their aura of power and death.
“We like it that way,” said Cora. She sounded affected. The RV had Texas plates. He was already smirking at her like they might have something to offer one another.
A woman appeared in the doorway with a pair of redheaded children grasping her hands. The three of them scowled in identical disposable ponchos with the National Parks logo on the front.
“Sweetheart,” said the man, “you grabbed a couple extra ponchos from the visitors’ center, didn’t you?”
The woman glanced between the man, Cora, and me. I liked the idea that we looked like a threat. That was how I wanted to appear—threatening, any trace of sweetness scrubbed away. I hated my soft face, wanted to become all cheekbones and jaw, bony and defined.
“I figured these two might tear the first set up or get them dirty, so I’m saving the extras,” said the woman, nodding at the children, who looked weary and distracted.
“These girls got no rain gear,” the man said, gesturing to us.
There was a long silence between them. Her lips curled, and she clacked back inside. She was wearing gladiator sandals—strappy and wedged—and I decided she was a fool. That was how I sorted women—I either adored them like I adored Cora, or I thought they were fools like my mother. I was determined to be adored, or at least feared and left alone. I would do anything not to be a fool.
“Y’all going to the cave loop?” he asked, and we nodded.
His wife, reappearing, dropped the ponchos into our hands with pointed carelessness. “Maybe we’ll see you there,” he said to us.
The misted landscape didn’t signal that it was full of underground cavities. The surface of the lava field looked like ruin, like the aftermath of apocalypse. Great furrows of charcoal-colored rock extended into the distance like a petrified sea. Black lava formations of varying heights and textures twisted up from the earth on either side of the paved trail. Every so often the poncho-clad tourists in the distance would disappear from the path, and I would know they had descended into a cave. When Cora and I descended it was another world, another level of darkness, the steps and ladders slippery with mist, the circle of light that marked the entrance receding, growing smaller until it was almost invisible.