Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

At the north entrance the chasm descends abruptly, like a giant’s stone staircase. There are alcoves along the way, which looked like caves to us when we were small, and if you look up you can read more romantic protestations scratched high on the sheer rock walls, chiseled deep, their authors hanging by a thread. You have to admire that. When we were kids we used to scamper fearlessly from rock to rock, even Abigail, who wasn’t nearly as agile as I. On this day I found that I could still scamper here, fueled as I was by outrage and desperation. I went down and down, past Lovers’ Leap, Devil’s Pulpit, that unnamed crevice where Abigail had gotten her leg stuck and been rescued by a handsome park ranger.

The chasm was mine alone, all other visitors apparently opting for the playground, and as I descended I lambasted my tormentors in full voice, and they listened attentively to me. “It’s time, people,” I said, “to put up or shut up. Divorce or kill each other. Either way, leave me out of it.” I said, “I quit,” over and over and over again, and when I caught my breath I was at the base of the chasm, in the boulder field, where there was as much earth as stone. The ground was spongy, and stretched over much of it was a thin shroud of ice, fragile as a pressed leaf. I sat down on a mossy rock and immediately the damp cold entered my bones and I was shivering, and my throat was closing up again, as though I were about to sob, but I wasn’t, not any more, no more of that nonsense. I quit. I quit. I quit.

Now they call them panic attacks. Maybe they were calling them that in 1978, but if so I had filed that term away with the Universal Choking Sign. To me a panic was a more or less rational response to a specific perceived threat. That day, at the bottom of Purgatory Chasm, I thought I was experiencing some sort of cardiac event. My heart, which should have slowed when I came to rest, banged in my ears, I was gulping for air for no good reason, and while attempting calmly to assess these symptoms I became terrified, again for no good reason. I had never been a fearful person, not even as a little child, but now I shuddered and gasped and whipped my head around, searching for the cause of my distress. There are no tigers in my native habitat, no bears either, but I felt stalked, staked out, hunted down, exposed to some piercing merciless eye. I had to get out of there, and yet I couldn’t move.

They call it “fight or flight” too, and I probably would never have flown, would have remained transfixed until I blended with the rock, had the word vastation not popped into my head like a cartoon mouse come to save the day, and I began to know what this was, I could name it!, the James boys had it, William and Henry, sought spiritual remedies for it, it was a real, comprehensible event, and I was not dying, probably.

Vastation. The word saved me, as words always have, and I could stir again, and stir I did, charging up the eastern loop of the trail back like a bat out of hell. I hiked uphill too fast for comfort, for I wasn’t after comfort, I was outrunning the beast in the jungle. In no time I was thirty feet above the chasm floor, hastening up the rocky rim, actually looking forward to rejoining Abigail and Conrad, and then I heard them clearly, close by. I couldn’t see them anywhere, yet their voices reverberated as though they were indoors, in a tiled room.

“I know what I’m doing,” my sister was saying. “I told you. We came here all the time.”

“What’s on the other side?” he asked.

“Come and see. Come on.”

There was a long silence. “Where’s Dorcas?” he asked.

“She’s fine. She knows her way around here. Come over here, with me.”

“I’ll just wait here. Take your time.”

They sounded almost amiable. I pretended, briefly, that their constant poisonous animosity was an act for my benefit, to keep me busy; that they were secretly the fondest of lovers.

“You’re scared,” said my sister. “You’re afraid to come in here with me.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You’re actually afraid.”

“I’m bored stiff.”

Abigail snickered. “Hardly stiff . Hardly that.”

“Go to hell.”

“What’s the matter with you now? Claustrophobia?”

By the sound they were close enough to touch: I heard him take a deep drag on his Marlboro; I heard the flicked stub snap against stone. Were they underground, beneath my feet? I walked out to the edge of an overhanging rock and peered around. I couldn’t spot them anywhere below, and they couldn’t very well be hiding in the trees at my back.

“Did she stuff you in a closet? Bury you alive?” Abigail sighed heavily. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t know, will I?” Abigail’s tone was remote, cool. She sounded like a therapist on autopilot.

“And just exactly why do you want to know?” His speech was beginning to slur. “You got a plan, sweetmeat?”

“I got a deal, lover. The deal is, you talk to me. We try to work through all your—”

“The deal is. The deal the deal the deal the deal. You kill me.”

She swore under her breath. “All right, I’m coming back. Move out of the way, please.”

There was a shuffling sound, the sound of nylon fabric whispering against stone, and I realized where they had to be: the Lemon Squeeze, a twenty-foot spherical rock split clean down the center, leaving just enough space for a child or a slender adult to edge through. At its far end was a sharp drop. When we were kids I used to slip through it all the time. Abigail never fit. In recent times they started calling it “Fat Man’s Misery,” but that’s a day-tripper name. It’s the Lemon Squeeze.

They were indeed below where I stood. I’d have to walk ahead and double back under to see them. I really didn’t want to do this.

“Do you mind? Would you please move? I can’t get by.”

“Fat-ass.”

“Idiot. Twiggy couldn’t get by you.”

“Go the other way.”

“The other end is impossible. It’s just a sheer drop.”

“What a fucking shame.”

“Which you’d know already, if you’d just had the balls to—”

There was the sound of scuffling. Abigail grunted, and swore again. “Let me by, you—” More scuffling, then the splash of broken glass. From Conrad came a stream of vile oaths and vicious, specific threats, and I ran down toward the Squeeze. Since the wedding they had never to my knowledge laid hands on each other; if this was a first, it was happening in a dangerous place.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said, “you evil, ugly, useless, ugly bitch.”

Abigail laughed, a brand-new and terrible laugh. Had Medea ever laughed, she would have sounded just like Abigail. “You’re on, champ,” she announced, and I could hear her shuffling back through the Squeeze. “Come and get me,” she said. Her voice no longer reverberated. She was standing on the tiny ledge, at the dropoff.

Then I could see her. I had made it down to their level and was facing the northern wall of the Squeeze, the western half of which jutted out over nothing. Abigail stood on tiptoe, way out beyond my reach, leaning into the narrow passage and taunting him, singing to him. Come and get me, Ramrodder, go ahead, kill me, you can do it, I’m right here. Come to Ma-ma.

I couldn’t have stopped him. Unable even to open my mouth to scream I stood rooted and held my breath and waited to see his long arms emerge and propel my sister into space. Today, when I close my eyes, I can still see those arms, sweatered in threadbare gray wool, shoot out, his crabbed hands extended toward her throat, the image far more vivid and persuasive than actual memory. In drab memory I hesitate dully calculating the odds of my dashing into the passage and tackling him before he succeeds in killing her. The odds were bad, on top of which if I took my eyes off her I was sure she would die. I had once been a capable, rational woman.