Page 41 of Here We Go Again
“Fuck you, Joseph Delgado!” Logan grunts. She attempts to throw a pillow in the dark, and it lands on the dog’s head. “It’s three thirty in the morning, you dick!”
“I know,” Joe singsongs cheerfully. “We better get going or we’re going to be late.”
After fifteen more minutes of yelling and cursing and throwing things, they’re in the hotel parking lot, groggy as hell, trying to load into the Gay Mobile without any reason as to why. They each have a cup of horrible hotel coffee Rosemary fetched from the lobby. She was shocked to see so many other tourists up and moving.
“Where are we going and why are we going there at this ungodly hour?” Logan bemoans as they get Joe into the back seat.
“Faith, Logan. Have faith in me.”
Logan makes a half-asleep sound of dissent. Rosemary has no faith to speak of.
The weather app says it’s going to be 104 today, but predawn, it’s a cool 70, and Rosemary feels more awake with the desert breeze on her bare skin, so she drives as Logan complains in the passenger seat with Odysseus sitting in her lap like a horse who thinks he’s a cat.
In the back, Joe is the most excited she’s seen him in four years—the mostalive—so she doesn’t question his directions when he tells her to take Highway 64 toward the national park.
As they near the entrance, the traffic thickens, throngs of other tourists making the same inexplicable pilgrimage. The sky is a muted predawn blue by the time they pull into a handicapped parking stop near Mather Point along with hundreds of other people.
Logan takes Odysseus’s leash, and Rosemary helps Joe toward a paved path.
They weave through the crowds, follow the path through a curve, andoh. There’s the Grand Canyon. Just right there.
Families have gathered around in unruly clusters, but Logan elbows her way up to the railing, carving out a spot for the three of them.
It’s justright there. A huge hole in the earth, endless rock highlighted and blurred by shadow and the rising sun.
“Oh,” Logan says in hushed awe.
“Ohis right,” Joe whispers, as if this moment is too sacred for his full volume.
Rosemary didn’t expect it to be quite so… grand. She’s seen pictures. She thought she knew. But pictures don’t capture the sweep of it, thefeelof it, like being on top of the world and on a different planet at the same time. On the other side of the canyon, the North Rim burns bright orange and neon yellow as the caverns below remain an unsolved mystery in the dark.
Joe points to the right, where the sun edges over the rocks,lighting up the canyon piece by piece. Golden spotlights reveal the grays and browns, yellows and reds of the rock below, layers stacked on layers. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen before.
The fire fades and the sky turns light blue, pale purple, shocking pink. The sun reaches new crevices one at a time, and there’s green sagebrush, deep orange and gold, white clouds streaked over a blue sky.
It’s sublime—there is no better word for it—and it stirs something she can’t quite name. Surrender, maybe, to a force she could never control.
No one speaks for a long time. Even Odysseus seems to know this morning is holy.
Rosemary watches the sunrise reflected on Joe’s face for a minute. The golden glow warms his brown eyes and catches the glisten of tears streaming down his cheeks. His mouth is open around a quiet gasp of wonder. It’s just as magical as watching the sunrise itself.
He looks the way Rosemary remembers from the first day of high school, so overwhelmed by the raw potential of the students in front of him.
“This,” Joe exhales. “I needed to see this before I die.”
Rosemary shifts her gaze to Logan and is startled to discover she’s crying, too.
“Shut up!” Logan grumbles, caught in the act. She tries, and fails, to brush away the tears with the back of her hand, and then hides her eyes behind her sunglasses instead. “I’m only human.”
“You know what we need…,” Joe starts, but Logan already has her phone out. Van Morrison starts playing “Into the Mystic.”
“Apt,” Joe croaks around a sob.
“Very apt,” Rosemary agrees. There are tears gathering in the back of her throat, but she holds them back. She tries to file these too-big feelings away so she can look at them later, when she’s alone. She already let Logan see her cry once on this trip.
But no matter how hard she tries, the feelings keep popping back up, like trying to hold a beach ball under the surface of a pool.
“I-I was wrong,” she says when the song ends. “About this detour. We… we had to come here.” The sun is a little higher now, and the dried-out path of the Colorado River becomes visible in the depths of the canyon. “This… this was worth going five hundred miles in the wrong direction.”
