EMILY


When I wake up, he’s still breathing.
Ragged, wet breaths
but Sam is alive.

I kiss the rough edge of his jaw.

He stirs then, as if to pull me closer, and his eyes open.
You’re here.

Of course I am, I tell him.

He props himself up on an elbow, listening.

They’ll be moving us soon.

He reaches out for my hand.

If they say to leave me. You leave me.

I shake my head, no, of course not -

Listen to me. There isn’t enough food and there aren’t enough carts. It isn’t worth keeping me alive.

He says it matter-of-factly, his eyes locked on mine as if he’s trying to remember something.

Someone appears at the front of the wagon and I scramble back into my damp clothes.
It’s Elder Rich, his face grim.
He and Sam exchange a long look. Sam nods.

We have to move on, Elder Rich says.

Sam tries to stand, but his legs give out.

I tell him, Sam, you can stay -

But Elder Rich shakes his head.
He can’t. We had to leave carts on the bank. We need the wagon for supplies and the children.

He looks back, again, at Sam.

I am sorry, Elder Crane.

Sam tries to speak, but a fit of coughing overtakes him.
I help him to stand and, limping together, we make our way out the back of the wagon.

Outside, what’s left of the camp is packing up.
My heart sinks as I realize that it’s true - there are too few carts and too many families.

Sam laughs, choking.
Emily. Are you going to carry me the whole way?

I will, I tell him, if I have to.

I cast around for help - 

And I see the Fielding family, and little Thomas, who danced with Marian, who Sam saved in the river.
The Fieldings, who still have their handcart.

I help Sam sit against the back of the wagon and march towards the Fieldings.
Before I even open my mouth, Mr. Fielding says: no.

He saved your child’s life, I say, it’s the least you can do.

I barely made it out of the river myself, Mr. Fielding says. I cannot pull him too.
His head is bandaged, and there’s a tremor in his hands.

Then, I say, let me do it.

I’ve surprised myself, even, but I keep going:
I’ll pull him. You’ll never have to touch the cart again, not until we get to Utah.

The Fieldings exchange a glance, Mrs. Fielding clutching Thomas close.

You’ll exhaust yourself, she says.

I look back at Sam, Sam who would be crushed to hear me bargaining for him, who would tell me again to leave him and go on.

Then I exhaust myself, I say.

Mrs. Fielding nods.
Without waiting for them to change their minds, I drag the cart back towards Sam.
He’s shaking his head, but I cut him off.
Let me do this, I say.

Emily, my lungs are on fire. I won’t last a day.

I grab Sam under both shoulders and yank him onto his feet.

You will, I tell him. You will.


KAYLEEN


I clear my throat.
You can talk.

The Monster cocks a tentacle.

Our minds vibrate on the same frequency.

The sand under my Tevas vibrates.

Go ahead.

His head is bobbing like a snake’s.
 
You must have infinite questions for the Bear Lake Monster.

There’s the one really big one, but I can’t start there.

Why did you kill Bronson? And Hyrum?

The monster’s thin lips pull back over his fangs in a motion resembling a smile.

Kill is such an ugly word, sprog. I…consumed them.

I can smell the blood in his breath now too, metallic and putrid.

You don’t smell so great yourself.

Can you read my mind? I ask.

So simplistic. I am attuned to the very vagaries of your soul.

Immediately, Tanya’s face flashes before my eyes.

Yessssss.

Now I’m sure he’s smiling.

You like that one.

My face burns in the darkness. His head comes to rest on one curled tentacle.

You’re no conversationalist at all. I consumed them because you wanted them gone. There. Now it’s all out in the open.

I didn’t, I say. I never wanted that.

And the Monster laughs, a grating, cacophonous sound, like teeth on a seatbelt.
Didn’t you?

I shake my head, because no, of course not - the blood plume - the woosh as the breath left Hyrum’s body -
And I got to kiss Tanya -

I’m going to kill you, I tell him. I have a whole plan.

We both know that’s not why you’re here.

There is something inside those wet eyes, something human and raw and so twisted with pain and loneliness that for a moment I have to look away.

You feel it too. I know you do.


EMILY


The first day felt impossible.

I was strong, but Sam was a grown man,
Yet I persisted, even as his cough grew fiercer, his breathing shallower.
I wrapped my hands in a thick layer of muslin from the bottom of my skirt and I pulled.

At night, when Sam could talk, I told him stories of growing up on the farm.
Two stories of mine for each of his.

I watched him as long as I could, the slick hair rising and falling on his chest.

Sleep, Emily, he’d say, his arm curled weakly around my back. You cannot will me into living.

But I could. And I would.

Each freezing night brought a morning sermon and corpses without graves. 
I hid the names from Sam. 
I would tell him when he was well.
I would share everything when he was well.

We forded another river into the Rockies. It was small, nothing like the Sweetwater, but I felt blind panic the whole way.

Don’t be afraid of water, Sam said.

I’m not, I told him. I’m afraid of what’s underneath it.

His mouth twisted.
Krakens and sea monsters?

I shook my head.
Cold. Fear. Bodies.

He kissed my forehead and let his eyes drift closed.

In the second week of October we passed over the Utah border.
It snowed so hard that Elder Rich waded from tent to tent, warning us not to try and move.

The very outside of the tent had frozen over.
There was no hope of starting a fire, but I tried anyway, carving out a small warren in the snow, using what was left of our gunpowder.

Emily, Sam says, leaning back against a frozen wall.
I look back at him.
Do you remember what you said to me on the ship?
I nod. I told you to stop being kind to me.
I know what he’s trying to say, but I won’t let him, even now, I won’t let him.
He reaches for me and I half-crawl back into his arms, kissing his face, his jaw, his neck, anything.
I’ve been thinking, he says. And I do not believe that, in a whole eternity, I will not find you.
His forehead is hot, hot like Marian’s, and there’s nothing I can do, nothing I can say.
I won’t let you, I tell him. I won’t let you go.
He kisses me, softly.
I’m asking you to trust me. Can you do that?
And I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
That night I hold him through the fever, I hold him while he shakes, I hold him even when the wind batters the sides of our tent so that I think it will fall down on top of us.

I hold him while his breath slows, as, looking into my eyes, he tells me over and over that it’s fine, let me go, Emily you have to let me go.

I hold him even when his heart feels like it’s jerking under my hand, when I know he’s halfway gone, when the snow is piled so high outside our tent I can no longer see the sky.

And I hold Sam when he dies, his eyes glazing over with a flatness that I do not recognize.

The last thing I say is that I love him.

I do not know if he hears me.


THE MONSTER


Do you ever wonder - you, with your comprehensible body and your too-big clothes - if it were possible to be understood fully?

I do. I wonder if two people can ever know each other so fully that, even in death, their particles and pieces would find each other, compelled by the magnetism of perfect knowledge.

Or is it the lack of knowledge that makes them whole, the undertaking of a Sisyphean quest towards understanding?

I wonder what it feels like in the moment before you kiss someone and know they want to kiss you back.

What it means to let someone reach right into your chest and hold the bloody, squirming mess inside.


KAYLEEN


There’s just one more thing to ask, but I can’t do it.

The Monster weaves and bobs in front of me, prying me open with his bloodshot eyes.
Ask me. Or are we still pretending you’re going to try and kill me?

The gun. I don’t even know how to use it.

I whisper: did you kill my Mom?

His body shudders, scales rolling off his back like pebbles.

Yessssssssssssssssssssssssss.

Quiet. Everywhere quiet.

I ask him:
Why?

He hisses softly and lays his head down on the sand next to me. I could shoot his eyes out.

I don’t know.

Now I hear a nearby car.
The waves lapping against the beach.

I thought I loved her.

Something dark black dribbles from the side of his mouth, staining his teeth. He licks it away.

I take the butt of the gun and ram it into his teeth over and over again until my forearms are soaked with thick black blood. The Monster doesn’t even flinch.
I batter at him until all his teeth are gone. 

He cracks his jaw and new teeth grow in, sharper and whiter.
I may be fading, Sprog, but not yet.

A tentacle winds around me in the sand.


THE MONSTER


The Sprog - Kayleen - looks at me, and there is only hopelessness in her eyes.

I could take her, right now.
I could pull her into my lake and she would thank me for it.

I wind my tentacle tight around her hips, her arms, all the way up to her shoulders.

She doesn’t struggle.

I reach an oily frond up to her face, the sharp planes so like Julia’s.

Julia.

A memory, sharp and bright:
A carnival ride like a tall tower.

Holding hands with Kayleen. Sweating, clasping palms.
A countdown. Kayleen shrieks with delight.

You plummet together, the neon world rushing past.
A neon world you built for her.
A whole life you built for her.

And love is not a thing you take but a thing you give;
as deep and unknowable as an ancient glacial lake.

Kayleen, I say.
Don’t give up now.


EMILY


I was still holding Sam’s body when the lantern broke through the ice.

I had decided to die hours ago.

A voice said, here miss, let go, but I wouldn’t let them take his body away, and so they had to pull us through the mouth of the tent together.

I recognized Mrs. Fielding’s face, coming towards me with a mug of something hot.
I do not want to be saved, I told her.

She thrust the mug into my hands.
Then she sat with me until she saw me drink it.

There was an older man, his face not unkind, who told us we were being rescued. Taking you to the next-closest settlement, he said.

I want to bury him, I said.

The man frowned. Ground’s too hard.

Water then, I said.

Mrs. Fielding helped me wrap Sam’s body in a shroud.
Little Thomas hovered nearby, his eyes dark.

Three hundred of us set out from Liverpool. Now there could not be more than half that, all of us crammed into a caravan of covered wagons.

The ground steamed as we rolled past, the mountains peeling away behind us.
An hour later, it stopped snowing.
We’d almost made it.

We crested the hill overlooking Bear Lake just as the sun was dipping back beneath the horizon.
The settlement itself was small, not much more than a way-station. But there were houses, and a town hall supplied with food and blankets.

There was a carpenter’s, too, smelling of teak oil and home.
I selected a pine box, the simplest.
Light enough to carry my heart inside.

I bring my love to the edge of Bear Lake where the sky is red-gold.
Once, he baptized me, and I held on tight to the thrum of his heart beneath his chest.

I pull the shroud back from Sam’s face.
I have learned every inch of it, but I learn it again.
I touch his lips one last time, the flat, frozen mouth.
I remember him as he was: warm and compassionate and alive.

I do not believe, he’d said, that in a whole eternity I will not find you.

I close the box and latch it.
Then I push my heart into the lake.


KAYLEEN


His bulbous, glassy eyes are inches from mine.

There is something that I want to give you.

The Monster takes my hand in a single sucker and places it on his monstrous face.
His skin is sticky, like flypaper.

His brain bubbles under my hand and then -

I see her.   

My mom dances in a dark room.

She’s at a wedding, a friend of a friend. A groomsman in a Hawaiian shirt asks, Can I get you a drink?

She waits for me to come, her body heavy and ungainly. She hopes that I will have my father’s eyes.

When I am born, only pain. And then only joy.

I am small and I am throwing toys into the bath to watch them float.

My first cut. My first bruise. The first time I cry because someone hurts me.

She watches me sleep and she counts every single breath.

I am loved, I am so so loved.

The Monster blinks, mucous membranes sliding down over his eyes.

So that’s what it’s like.


EMILY


I did not die that day, or the next.
I left Bear Lake a week later.

I wanted to make it to Salt Lake.
For Sam.
For Marian.
To finish the journey they started.

I never stopped to look back.
Sam’s arm, at the end, pulling me close, using the last of his strength to be near me.
Another step.

As I fell asleep each night I could see him the second before I closed my eyes.
(There he is, in the kitchen back in Horsely
Hair in his eyes)—

Elder Rich told me, before I left:
He is with Heavenly Father now.
A Celestial Kingdom, where you too will be one day.

And yet I was still alive, the fullness of my existence spread out before me like a sunrise.

There were no answers in Salt Lake.
I don’t know what I had expected.

I spent a year there, trying to learn something of Sam in this harsh valley, with its lake of salt and its towering mountains.

The Saints were building their temple right in the center of the city.
They began giving baptisms for the dead, starting with the pioneers who didn’t make it across the trail.
I wondered if Sam would have liked that.

In the summer of the following year I return, again, to Bear Lake.

I move myself into a house overlooking the water.

I visit often with the Fieldings.
Thomas speaks only English, they say. We are very proud.

I leave things by the water, sometimes. Small trinkets that remind me of him.

Are those for the monster? says Thomas. Elder Rich says there’s a monster in the lake.

I ruffle his hair and splash him gently with the water.

What do you think? I say.

It’s an unextraordinary life.
But it is mine.


THE MONSTER


She is with us on the beach.

The girl with blacked-out eyes and a shirt that says I’M NO ANGEL.

She picks up the gun lying in the sand and points it square in my eyes.

If you hurt her, she says, I will literally fucking end you.

It wouldn’t work, but I do not tell her this. She is too in love.

Instead, I look at Kayleen.


KAYLEEN


My heart is in my chest.

I say: Tanya.


THE MONSTER


The girl fires off her first shot and it spatters my right eye all over the sand.

It’ll grow back. Probably.

I scuttle backwards on my too-short legs, everyone I’ve ever eaten roiling inside me.

Bits of flesh and coils of hair and all the memories, all the pain -

The girl runs to Kayleen and gathers her up in her arms, one arm around Kayleen and one hand on the trigger.

I feel a deep pain like my heart imploding and I am disgorging them into the sand, all the memories and blood and bones.

Some of my own intestine, it feels like.

Kayleen asks me: Are you dying?

I gasp: I don’t know.

I plunge my wrecked body back beneath the lake.


KAYLEEN


The Monster is gone.

He will not come back.

Tanya’s arm is around my neck, sweaty and warm and real.

She says: I knew that you were gonna do something stupid.

I kiss any part of her I can reach, her shoulders, her mouth, the curve of her neck.

She bends against me and we are alive, alive, alive.


THE MONSTER


Maybe, after all that, I close my eyes and die. 
My body breaks apart in the water and no one ever finds it.
They say it was an animal attack.
They say there are no more monsters left in the world.

Or maybe I don’t.

I learn the secret passages within the world where once the most ancient and vulnerable of my kind roamed free.

I live beyond the lifetimes of man, a repository of trinkets and memories and all the tiny perfect things that make up a life.

I’m the oddly-shaped log glimpsed from a window, the ripples in the ocean, the possibility of eternity.

Maybe, when you’re not looking, it all makes cosmic sense.

Or not.

There are some secrets I keep for myself.


EMILY


Beyond death,
after my body gives out,
after my grandchildren clutch my hands and I breathe my last shuddering breath,
beyond space and time:
he finds me again.

I've been waiting so long.
But I have never been a patient person.

Emily, he says.
Emily.

We are two parts of one heart and the things that stars are made of.

We will cling together, he and I, until the world falls apart.


KAYLEEN


The FBI reports it as a series of animal attacks.
They come into town a week later and sweep the woods, finding nothing but black bears and herons. 
They check the lake, too, just to be sure. 
It’s a big operation, with divers and police boats and radar machines. 
The only thing they find is an old pine box.

I listen to the news with my feet on Tanya’s lap, still worried that if I blink she’ll disappear. 
My Dad makes popcorn in the other room.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
In August I take Tanya to the Strawberry Days Festival.
We get a lot of looks and I’m like we should leave even though Tanya is determined to Make a Statement. 
Jessica stomps up to us in a Strawberry Queen sash and plastic crown. She says: Don’t worry. You’re with me. 
I kiss Tanya under a big banner that reads STRAWBERRY DAYS 1989: BRONSON REED & HYRUM BATES: IN OUR HEARTS ALWAYS RIP!!!!!

In the fall I drive to California because it’s something new.
I say: Wait for me. 
She says: I’m not here to hold you back, Marv. 

Tanya and I stay together until my second year of college at USC, when the distance becomes too much and I fall hard for a hot premed girl in my Chemistry class.

I get an apartment in San Francisco. I take a job in environmental science and become an advocate for solar panels. I have three giant dogs and I win awards for my innovations. I move to Los Angeles. Women come and go.

Decades later, at my Dad’s funeral, I kiss Tanya again.

I say, you should’ve asked me to  stay.
She says: you should’ve called. 

My heart starts to fail in 2065. When I die, two years later, it is in a bed overlooking the ocean. 

At my memorial many people say nice things about my research and my woman-ness and my first-ness and my Lesbianity and everyone has a nice cry. 

The only one there who really knows me is Tanya. 
She holds her granddaughter’s hand and calls me Aunt Kayleen. 

I am not there to see it.

My Mom said: Marv, not everything is science. 

But if matter can neither be created nor destroyed, then I have to conclude that the people we love never really leave us. 

Before flying home from the funeral, Tanya takes her granddaughter to Disneyland. Like she promised. 

Her granddaughter refuses to leave the spinning cups. When Tanya asks why, she scrunches up her face and says: I just need to know how they work. 

She doesn’t see Tanya’s smile. 
She’s too busy watching the turntables go round and round.