Where the sky lives, p.1
Where the Sky Lives, page 1
Dedication
To the National Park Service
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
The Summer Before
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Margaret Dilloway
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Summer Before
The stars are almost out. Uncle Ezra watches me set up the tripod for his telescope. I think he’s worried I’ll forget a step. The telescope’s heavy and sits on top of the tripod, so if this part’s not set up right, the telescope will fall and break. “I’m making sure everything’s tightened.” I push down on the top to demonstrate. One of the legs collapses. “Whoops.”
“It’s okay. That’s why we double-check.” Uncle Ezra ruffles my hair. He is the only person in the world that I let do that. My mother, Dana, is more the type to give you an approving nod instead of touching you. Which, to be honest, is also how I am.
Dana looks up from the pot of beans she’s stirring over the open flame. I don’t normally like beans, but I love them when we’re camping. Uncle Ezra says it’s eating them in the open air that makes them tasty.
It’s almost sunset, and we’re at our favorite secret spot, on land called Hedges Ranch next to Zion National Park. We’re allowed in here because my mother is an archaeologist at Zion and my uncle is an astronomer, and they’re mixing our camping with research.
It’s a chore to get up here with all the equipment. Dana and I only do it when Uncle Ezra’s here to help carry the tents and backpacks. “My brother the pack animal,” Dana calls him. We found an open field with the best view of the stars. Or Ezra did.
“So, Tuesday, are you going to be an archaeologist like me or an astronomer like your uncle Ezra?” Dana takes out a spoonful of beans, blows on them, tastes. “I recommend archaeologist so you can get some sunshine once in a while. Your uncle’s basically a vampire.”
“What is this, some kind of competition?” Uncle Ezra laughs, setting the telescope on top of the tripod and tightening the bolts.
“Isn’t everything with us?” Dana gestures at the blanket next to her. On it sit some tiny pottery shards that we found earlier in the day, probably from a Paiute tribe that once lived near here. Actually, Ezra was the one who found them. Dana marked the spot and will take these back to the lab and look at them under a microscope. I’ve done it with her a dozen times. “Don’t you want to keep finding earlier civilizations, Tuesday?”
“Maybe she’d rather be part of the future civilization.” Ezra points upward. “Besides, since I’m the one who discovered those, maybe I ought to be doing your job, too.”
“Ha. You got lucky once and you think you’re an expert.” Dana pretends the bowl of beans is a baseball, drawing her arm back as if she’s going to pitch. “Don’t make me throw these at you.”
“I can find a new archaeological site whenever I like,” Ezra brags. “I’ll find a new one up here and you won’t even know until I publish a paper.”
Dana scoffs. “It’s not that easy.”
“Of course not. But maybe I already stumbled across one.” He wiggles his brows.
Dana puts down the beans. “Wait. Did you?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t give you the information so easily,” Ezra says. “I’d make you work for it.”
“Like one of your scavenger hunts?” I perk up. I love it when Ezra gives us clues to find things. Sometimes they’re online scavenger hunts, directing us to find our birthday presents, but he’s also done them in person.
“Really, Ezra, if you found something . . .” Dana looks mad.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Ezra grins at me. I grin back.
“Ugh. Don’t tease me like that.” She shovels food into her mouth. “You’re impossible!”
“That’s what big brothers are for.”
She sticks her tongue out, which is pretty gross considering the mushed beans in there.
“Now, children.” I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t make me turn this car around.” They both laugh. I sit on the blanket next to my mother and try the beans. “These are good. Thanks, Dana.”
She points to the can label. “Thank the Beanie Company, not me.”
I turn back to Ezra. “Why can’t I be both an astronomer and an archaeologist?”
“You can be whatever you want, Tuesday.” He comes over to the fire. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
A strong breeze whips up, and a little stream of bright embers flies out from the fire, then goes dark. Both Dana and I shiver. “That was cold,” I say. Feathery pieces of ash have gotten into my beans. “Guess that’s one way to flavor them.” The wind hits again, whipping smoke into my eyes, and I blink back tears. “Gosh. Just let me eat my beans in peace, wind!” I shake my fist at my imaginary enemy.
Ezra settles on my other side, so he’s at a right angle to me and Dana. “I’ll be a wall.” And he does block the wind, protecting us so we can eat. Now it’s like I’m sitting behind a big boulder, and nothing can touch me.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I point at the beans.
The breeze hits again, harder now, at a slightly different angle, and Ezra repositions himself like he’s our personal umbrella. “I can wait.”
I don’t know it then, but it’s the last time Ezra will ever visit us. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have changed a thing about that evening.
Except maybe I would have pretended to be his wall, too, so he could have eaten his dinner in peace.
Chapter
1
The sky is full of secrets.
If you’re lucky, you can see the moment a star bursts into flames and dies—a supernova. Or discover a new comet. Or maybe even find alien life. All because you happened to be looking in the right place at the right time.
Astronomy takes some luck. That’s what Uncle Ezra always said when he took me stargazing. “Do the hard work first, so if you get a lucky opportunity, you can grab it.”
Lots of amateur scientists like me have made discoveries and had things named after them. Why should I be any different? I have more chances than most people to be lucky, when it comes to the sky. Zion National Park, where Dana and I live, has one of the clearest views of the stars in the entire country. They’re trying to get certified as an International Dark Sky park, but it’s still listed as one of the best places in the country to stargaze. Right now I’m sitting in one of the offices in the administrative building, because this is the only place with any kind of Wi-Fi signal besides the lodge, where they don’t exactly want an extra kid hanging out all the time.
I scroll through the photos my telescope camera took, looking for one of these grand moments. I scan the images with my eyes until something sparks my attention. Venus. It’s not a crystal-clear image—the camera that I got from Uncle Ezra is nice, but not that nice.
I post the picture to my ClearNights forum account anyway. Venus used to be a habitable planet like Earth until greenhouse gases built up and made it uninhabitable, I write. This is a fact I learned from astronomy, one of the secrets I’m talking about. Most users on ClearNights are astronomers like me, so they’ll already know this, but a few may not. Do you think the Earth will end up like Venus because of climate change? This is something I don’t know the answer to.
Super cool photo, a user named CheddarBunny comments. She’s a girl my age who lives in Texas and is one of my Dana-approved online friends. People on the internet aren’t always who they say they are, but I know she’s real because Dana set up a FaceTime through her mother. Her actual name is Natalia.
Thanks, I post.
Sometimes other planets tell us about things on Earth. Or how to study them. For example, in the forum there’s a planetologist who used to study the currents on Jupiter. She used the same math to create ocean current models for the navy.
Grant, who is a law enforcement park ranger—LE, we call them—and also my best friend Carter’s brand-new stepdad, takes off his broad-brimmed khaki hat as he steps inside. He’s worked here a few years, but still, Grant’s almost a stranger to me, and I don’t like to talk much to people I don’t know, so I look at the table and kind of give him a nod.
Carter and I are alike in that we don’t have fathers. Or didn’t, until recently, because now Carter has Grant. Carter’s dad di
My uncle Ezra wasn’t a father the way people usually mean it, but he was like my father. On Father’s Day, he’s the one I sent a card to. He didn’t live with us, but I never felt far away from him. He always knew everything about me—how I felt about school, which books I’d read. And he was like me in ways that Dana isn’t. He said the right things to help me whenever I needed it.
He was my safe person.
Now Ezra’s gone, and seeing Grant reminds me of that all over again. Grant’s nice, and I’m happy for Carter, but it makes me miss my uncle even more.
Grant’s freckled and tan face is clean-shaven. His red hair is springy and coiled, but right now it’s sticking to his scalp with sweat. Which isn’t unusual, because it’s over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside. He takes off his sunglasses and puts on regular glasses—Grant is very nearsighted. “Hi, Tuesday,” he says to me. “I’m about to go pick up Carter. Do you want to come?” He takes off his glasses again and mops at his face with a bandanna.
My other option is to go home and wait for Dana. But it’s only four thirty and she doesn’t get off until six. She’s out “in the field” today, doing research.
He smiles at me. He gets lines around his eyes and mouth when he smiles, indenting his brown freckles and cinnamon-colored skin. I wonder if he gets wrinkle cream ads like the ones that pop up on Dana’s computer. But they only ever show wrinkles on women.
“Do your wrinkle cream ads show men?” I ask him.
Now his forehead crinkles. “What?”
I realize I’ve skipped ahead in my mind, and of course he can’t follow me. I do that sometimes. “Sorry.” I remember what he actually said and try to respond to that. “Yes, I would like to go with you to pick up Carter.”
“Okay.” He jangles the ring of keys on his brown belt. “Delilah’s right outside.”
He pushes open the glass door, and I follow him into the bright, hot sunshine. Delilah is not a person, as I thought when Grant first mentioned the name. It’s his red Jeep. “It’s cheesy, but what can you do?” Carter said when he told me.
The Jeep has doors, but there’s only a metal frame above us. I climb into the passenger side and buckle my seat belt. Grant hands me a broad-brimmed hat to put on, since the sun will burn my somewhat pale skin within twenty minutes. “You good?” He starts Delilah.
“Yes.” I grab the bar above the front window where it meets the frame, because though Grant is a careful driver, being in the Jeep makes me feel like I’m on a roller coaster that’s lost its brakes. And I don’t even like regular roller coasters.
Chapter
2
It takes almost twenty minutes to get out of the park today, though we’re traveling less than a mile. Cars keep pulling off to take photos of the canyon walls—I can’t exactly blame them for that. They’re pretty impressive, especially when you first see them.
A long time ago, during the Jurassic era, this was nothing but sand dunes—a desert. Those dunes are what eventually turned into the canyon walls. Millions of years of water and wind have exposed the sandstone’s layers, in rusty red, pink-orange, and beach white at the top. From far away, the sandstone looks like it has lots of pockmarks and indents—when you get closer, you can see that there are some caves and cliffs in the walls.
The lowest point of the canyon is more than three thousand feet deep, and the tallest peak is more than eight thousand high, so when you’re in Zion, you feel very small—especially if you go into one of the tighter spots in the canyon, like the Narrows. In the bright sun, the walls remind me of rainbow sherbet.
Once I got used to seeing the walls, though, I stopped noticing them. Dana says that’s a thing that happens. Like if you hang a new poster in your room, at first you keep thinking, “Ah, what a great new picture!” but eventually you get used to seeing it and no longer notice it much.
When we go to another place for a while and come back to Zion, though, it’s like seeing it all fresh again. Minds are weird like that.
The other weird thing that happens, at least to me, is when we go to another city—especially Las Vegas, which is the closest big one—I can’t stand how everything smells. It’s like living where the strongest scent is campfire smoke has made my nose get used to only pure air. Dana says that’s not something she notices, so maybe it’s only me. One of my secret useless superpowers, Uncle Ezra called it. His secret useless superpower was always picking the slowest line in the grocery store. Dana’s useless superpower is picking fruit that has an unseen bruise on the inside.
There’s a bunch of cars with black-tinted windows parked all together in the visitor lot and people with walkie-talkies talking to the park rangers. “Some Instagram celebrity’s visiting,” Grant says. “Lyla Redding.”
It’s not surprising that I don’t know who that is. I don’t follow that kind of stuff—it’s not interesting to me. Plus, ever since Dana and Uncle Ezra and I watched a documentary about how social media is designed to basically suck out your brain and sell it to companies, I haven’t had any desire to use it. “There are already so many visitors. I hope she doesn’t make the park even more popular.” We’re now stuck waiting to make a left turn onto the main road, behind a long line of tourists.
Carter’s taking a rock-climbing class that’s held on Hedges Ranch. Four generations ago—which would be like my great-great-grandparents’ age—some man named Charles Hedges purchased four thousand acres of land next to Zion. He kept it all wilderness, and it’s stayed in his family ever since. One of his great-grandsons began letting people use parts of it for a fee, so that’s where Carter’s doing his rock climbing.
This is also where Uncle Ezra and my mother and I used to go camping. Where Ezra took me stargazing. Where there are tons of important archaeological sites. The ranch is as important to me as Zion—maybe even more so, because so much of the ranch is what they call pristine. That means it’s untouched, which is almost impossible to find anywhere, even inside a national park.
Aside from the rock-climbing area, most of Hedges is off-limits to the public. You can either do the rock-climbing class, which isn’t very far inside, or you need written permission, which is what my mother has. I’m not sure how it works for anyone else.
I don’t know how it’ll work in the future, either, because Hedges is actually for sale. It’s been for sale for two months, ever since the owner died and his heirs decided they couldn’t take care of it anymore. Or they don’t want to take care of it anymore. I’m not sure which, or if it even matters.
We ride two minutes along the road, then turn left under a log arch that says Hedges Ranch in old-timey wood-burned font. The For Sale sign next to the arch now has a Sold sign above it. I turn to Grant. “It sold already?”
Grant nods. “A few weeks ago. They just made it public.”
My heart does a double thump. “Who bought it? Will they keep it the same?” I hope it’s someone like the Hedges family, who liked the land as it is and also allowed some use. It would be terrible if someone came here and built skyscrapers or a mall or something. Everything would be different.
Not to mention, that ranch is my special place. Where the best memories of Uncle Ezra and me and my mom all are. No place I’ve ever been is so still, so peaceful. Whenever I’m there, I think about how many millions of years it took for the land to look like this, all the people who once lived there, like the Paiute tribe, and it feels like I’m one small piece of a bigger puzzle. “Some people have religion,” Uncle Ezra said, the last time we were there, “but this is our church.”
“I’m not sure.” Grant drives up the gravel road, sending a cloud of gray-white dust churning behind us. “If there’s one thing you can count on in life, it’s that it’ll change.”
Change. A thick feeling comes into my throat. First we lose Uncle Ezra. And now we’re losing this land. “Change has not been good for me lately.”
“Think positively.” He chuckles. “Like me, going from being alone to having a full family all in one day.”
Grant makes it sound like he met and married Carter’s mom on one day. I furrow my brow. “Didn’t you date Jenny for a year before you got married?”
“Yes, but . . .” He shakes his head. “I meant the marriage ceremony was a day.”
