Synesthesia: Chapter Forty-Five
serial fiction
I wish I could tell you that Amber took pity on me. That she saw I was suffering, recognized the depths of misery I was in, and led me by the hand away from the crowds and their stinking, complicated emotions.
But it didn’t happen that way.
After I hurled the contents of my stomach unceremoniously into the Grand Canyon, I wiped my mouth with the hem of my T-shirt and smeared away the water that had formed in my eyes using the back of my hand. And then I waited.
Amber stared down into the chasm, or across it at the distant north rim, or perhaps just off into space as she daydreamed about who knows what. All I know is that I couldn’t get her to budge.
I kept one hand clasped over my nose and mouth to try to keep out the cacophony of smells, all the while silently begging to be teleported away from it all, off into some empty corner of a desert somewhere, where the clean dry air would wash all the world’s feelings away.
The smell of my own vomit on my breath was hard to stomach, but I refused to move my hand away and let in the stench of ten thousand people’s emotional shitstorms.
I felt something small and warm bash repeatedly against my left leg. I looked down. Jacob was bouncing restlessly between my leg, Amber’s leg, and the metal fence in front of him, ping-ponging in a hopeless triangle of boredom.
My chest deflated. I’d wanted to do something nice for the kid, and here he was bored and tired of the place already.
I reached out the hand that wasn’t plastered across my nose and mouth and tapped Amber on the shoulder. She looked over at me, and I pointed down toward Jacob.
“Baybe we can take hib on a hike,” I suggested, my nose still pinched shut.
She looked at me in what must have been confusion. But I wasn’t about to un-pinch my nose to find out.
I pointed again in the direction of a thinning in the crowd, hoping desperately she would agree this time.
Without a word, she picked up her son, positioned him across one hip, and began pushing her way through the crowd.
Thanking her internally with everything I had, I followed close behind, not once letting the back of her head out of my sight.
I didn’t pay the slightest attention to where we were or how far we’d gone. I just walked, following as close as a train car, until there was clean air around me instead of sweating, stinking bodies, and eventually I saw that we’d arrived at some sort of a trailhead.
“You said you want to take him on a hike?” Amber inquired, turning around for the first time to look at me. Something twisted in my chest. I wondered if she would have even noticed if I had disappeared during our trek over here, or if she just would have turned around and finally seen an empty space where she’d expected me to be. Then I wondered if she would have cared.
Against the thousand brown tones of the rocks and the turquoise blue of the sky, Amber’s eyes glowed greener than ever. I fingered the paper-wrapped chunk of fossilized tree sap in my pocket, tempted to make this the spot where I would finally spill it all to her. My lips parted as if in slow motion, preparing to form the first word of my confession.
“Okay, then, let’s go,” she said, and the green eyes were gone in a flash, obscured by the back of her head, her stringy hair hanging down like threadbare curtains against her bony skull.
I closed my mouth and released the piece of amber, letting it drop back down into the darkness at the bottom of my pocket.
I’d never been an avid hiker. In fact, aside from a couple of required field trips in school, I’d never hiked at all. But I knew enough to understand that heading down into the largest canyon in the United States with no water, no phone, no supplies of any kind, and wearing sandals to boot, was a terrible idea.
Still, I didn’t ask Amber to stop or turn around.
We could have avoided the crowds some other way. We didn’t have to descend into the Grand Canyon to be alone.
But I kept going, and I let Amber and Jacob keep going.
Because faintly, ever so faintly, I had caught the scent of fear.