1.
Maybe you watch the episode on repeat, trying to decide how nervous you look. Maybe after twenty or thirty views you deconstruct it like I do, until this version of us is the one that feels true. It’s about the kids, I say at one point, as if reading off a cue card. A montage of parents: the kids, the kids, the kids. One dad wipes away tears. I’d do anything for my boy. Cut to the same man elbowing another man out of the way as he roars toward the caves.
Terrible parents being terrible, someone has written in the comments. Set those children free!
And I get it, because there you all stand with those unholy orange walls behind you, faces tipped toward video screens as the clock counts down to zero. Cut to footage of me falling near the finish line. Cut to you closing your eyes, hiding behind your hand so nobody will see you break. What mother, watching this, wouldn’t want to do better?
2.
They put us up at a hotel a couple hours from the airport, in a single room with two double beds. All night as you slept next to your dad I listened to you breathe, the little gasps you made as your limbs found new positions. When the alarms went off—mine, then yours, then your dad’s—I couldn’t imagine the day that lay ahead of us. The pajamas you wore were plain and unfamiliar, navy blue with prim white piping. Where were the dinosaurs? The spaceships? I didn’t ask, just wheeled my suitcase into the bathroom to get ready. When I came out a few minutes later you and your dad were wearing green tracksuits and squeezing caffeine gel shots into your mouths.
“What is that? What are you giving him?”
“Relax,” your dad said. “Not now.”
You stood at the mirror, practicing your dance moves. My job was to say something jokey and sweet to remind you I was on your side, but you told me to stop staring and your dad had it under control anyway. “Perfect, bud-bud. Nice job with the arms this time.”
A few minutes later, in the dining area, we heaped scrambled eggs and potato cubes onto plates, pretending we might actually eat this much. I watched as you peeled back the lid of a yogurt cup and poked a spoon inside like you were planting a flag.
“You nervous?”
“Kind of. I thought—”
The camera crew charged in, and you sat up, spine-straight in your chair. You crackled like a sparkler and flashed a smile you’d probably rehearsed for weeks. Before I could think of a way to tell you none of it mattered, they called your name and you hurried away for your first interview.
Your dad emptied another gel shot into his mouth. “This could really be a game changer for us. For him.”
“What would it change?”
“Promise me you won’t overthink it. Can we at least agree that the goal here is to win?”
◊ ◊ ◊
A bouncing motorcoach, a blue-brown twilight, a dusty landscape caught off guard by our arrival, as though someone had forgotten to clean up beforehand. It felt boundless, though, like it held the crater of every test bomb ever detonated. “Look at all those rocks,” someone said. “It kind of makes me dizzy, the way it goes and goes and just…goes.”
Probably I should have been able to explain what we were seeing, what geologic processes had been at work and for how many centuries or eons or whatever. I should have been as big and unbothered as the brown hills, let the little things go instead of sharpening them into grievances. Because what did it matter that you’d boarded the bus after me but hadn’t sat next to me, that you’d picked a different seat so your dad could slide in beside you?
The matching tracksuits. I get it; I do.
Out my window, the sky was pinks and oranges, then blinding yellow as the sun crested a row of hills. We’d given up our phones outside the hotel, and since we couldn’t take pictures nobody seemed to know what to do.
“Bag it, baby!” a kid yelled from the back. “It’s almost time!”
The man next to me laughed and jiggled a nervous leg. He wore a vest ridiculous with pockets, Day-Glo like a highlighter. Every so often he leaned forward to talk to the girl in the seat in front of him.
After a few miles, he turned to me. “Divorced?”
“On the way.”
“Yep. Me too.”
I touched the callouses on my palms while he told stories about his daughter. “She wants to host a home makeover show. Only eleven and already she knows.” He waved out at the desert as though this was where dreams were kept.
We were all divorcing. We were all estranged. We knew the extremes of love and unlove, and some days we were so distorted that the only thing we could agree on was it’s better this way. You slept in two different beds and ate at two different tables—you and all the other kids on the bus that morning, because a broken family is nothing new. It’s a cliché as big as the desert sky.
But really, though. There it was. So blue, and with room enough for each of us to rise up, wingspan by wingspan by wingspan, and claim a piece of it for ourselves.
You must remember this. The hum of anticipation. The way the camera operators wandered the aisle, always filming. The way your arms up shot up when the Bag It! compound came into view, as you and every other kid on that bus erupted from your seats like a single, starved organism.
3.
“Can I be on the show, Mom? Can I?”
I told you I needed to watch it first, assuming we’d do it together. This was after your dad moved out, after I’d started leaving notes for myself, reminders to be busy and be authentic and reconnect. I’d been climbing again, and I liked the soreness in my muscles, the way they longed to relearn what they could do. Some evenings when you were at your dad’s I strung a wire between two trees and walked those sixteen feet, back and forth, until my feet were sore.
Balance, one of my notes said.
The point of this isn’t that I was being too literal, or that you were spending more nights at your dad’s than we’d agreed to. The point isn’t that when I asked if you wanted to try out the tightrope you dismissed the idea without looking up from your phone, or that I couldn’t remember the last fun thing we’d done together. It isn’t that I cleaned and cleaned until it felt like I’d paid off some unnameable debt and for the first time in a decade I could do more than exist for you. The point is that we never got around to watching Bag It! and when your dad sent me texts like why not let the kid go for it? and he’s more likely to be hit by lightning, I trusted him and said yes.
I didn’t know you’d submitted a video of us, that it included footage of me on the tightrope, that your dad and I would be the ones competing. A scavenger hunt, was how you sold it, which made me think of that one Easter morning when you trundled through the backyard with your new stuffed bunny and screamed with joy each time you found a plastic egg. That was the summer I built you a rabbit hutch—do you remember it? You stood next to me, the warm excitement of your breath on my shoulder as you whispered promises about what a good pet owner you would be.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Must be nice to have the time for this,” your dad said. Meaning the hutch. Meaning everything you and I did together when he wasn’t home. He was caught up in the every-man-must-prove-himself culture his job required. A trap, he acknowledged; temporary but necessary, the only way to get ahead. I got the message and started working part time, from noon to eight-thirty three days a week. On these afternoons your grandmother watched you until your dad got home, and the three of you ate dinner together. By the time I arrived you were already asleep.
“I think I cracked the bedtime code,” your dad told me while I loaded the dishwasher. Then he described “Horsey” for me, a game in which you rode around on his back and let him send you flying onto the sofa, again and again and again. “Honestly, I’ve never seen him conk out this fast before.”
One Saturday I woke up to find the two of you out in the backyard. Your dad had turned over a section of our fallow garden and brought up the black soil from underneath. He shook out a packet of carrot seeds and handed you a tiny watering can. When those first little leaves of future bunny food came up, when you brought your head close to them and mumbled something I couldn’t hear, I thought we were in it, this was living, it would be okay.
◊ ◊ ◊
You sent me the news by text. I GOT IT!!!! They picked me!
I pictured you breathless—MomMomMomMom—but on my phone there were all these emojis, and so I responded with the same ones you used, scared to use the wrong face, the wrong words, to not sound happy enough.
I texted your dad: you said there was no chance.
I know! We should play the lottery!
Only then did I watch the show. In bed, sick with some 48-hour thing, I let the Bag It! episodes play, unprepared for the spectacle of contestants running through manufactured caves filling huge, clear backpacks with whatever they could find. It was the apex of a fever. It shivered and sweated and ached. Split-second decisions about what to take, what the dollar value might be, whether an item was worthless or fake. Did I dream one with stacks and stacks of play money with only a few real bills mixed in? Did I dream one in which contestants ran around looking for the most valuable countertop appliances to shove into their bags? Meanwhile in that bright, bright room like a cartoon jail the kids watched the competition unfold, dancing every so often for the cameras. As the clock wound down, they raised their fists, eyes adrenaline-wide with the fight and the flight, until all they could do was yell.
4.
We sat in a fenced-off area under a faded canopy, on plastic chairs like in a beer garden. Crew members in polo shirts handed out bottled water. Someone said it was supposed to reach 112 degrees later, but there was no way to check so how could we believe it? Nearby, night lingered damp on shaded hillslopes. Granite or sandstone or maybe basalt; somehow they all sounded correct. Into the tallest hill they’d built an arena, the place they called The Dugout. Part building, part mountain. Brown-gray metal bolted to brown-gray rock, with the Bag It! logo in yellow. I couldn’t guess how many feet tall or how many gallons of paint they’d used or if a person could see it from space. To pass the time, I studied the mountain part of it, imagined how I would tackle it, what route I would take to the top, how much water I’d need.
You and your dad were as bright as emeralds. He made some remark about my clothing, how bland I looked in my Capilene shirt and reinforced-knee pants. The joke was that nobody would notice me if I started walking away. The joke was that I was as brown-gray as the rocks, as insert-word-here as the rocks.
Rigid, was what I came up with. Stark. Inhospitable.
“You’re like one of those lizards, Mom.”
I flashed you my lizard tongue, and you giggled. My body became weightless, or maybe that was when I left it altogether.
◊ ◊ ◊
In every episode, the interview portion is brief; a few snippets to capture the excitement, the nerves, the confidence. In reality we stood there for several minutes, long enough for your dad to give a rehearsed answer about how spelunking was in his blood, how he had uncles who worked in the mines. Now, watching us, I notice the stiffness in my torso as you step closer to your dad and I lean to fill in the empty space. I see the face of a woman who’s been standing next to a window for years but has only just thought look through it.
◊ ◊ ◊
Me with the heights, your dad with the caves. The opposites attract of us and the trips we took, trudging down narrow streets in our backpacks, the windows of our hotel room flung wide at night and the lusty anticipation of tomorrow, of discovery, of everything. The sandwiches we made, bits of cheese, slices of cucumber, tomatoes we bit into like apples. My funny little coin purse that popped open like a mouth, counting up our dwindling money. Your dad’s pocketknife, peeling the skin off a piece of fruit we’d shaken from a tree. Stone steps, winding up with no handrails, and the way your dad grabbed onto me when the view from the top gave him vertigo. See the world and then live the world. We promised it to each other and then to you when you were born, every part of you so perfect it made me cry a little to think about all the ways life could ruin you.
There was a joke in your name. Something about the alphabet, about getting it right the first time and skipping straight to Z. Zane like a wacky outfit, your dad said. Or the spot where a wave breaks, I said. Zane like an owl’s swiveling head. Zane like a cosmic shade of purple. Like the night-iced shine of snow. We named you like you could be anything, like you would be.
◊ ◊ ◊
“If you win, will the two of you get back together?” The Bag It! interviewer’s smile was the color of bleached bones. You turned away and placed your fingers underneath your hair, found the familiar spot you’d once rubbed bald with worry.
◊ ◊ ◊
The Dugout. Get it? Because they dug out the inside of a mountain. They scooped out the real rock to make room for the synthetic stuff, which was spongy underfoot as we filed in and gazed up at the cliff faces with their ladders and ledges. The yellowy bulbs that lit up the cave openings reminded me of a gaudy, old-fashioned hotel, if the hotel were a zoo and all the animals were gone.
When it was time for the kids to head off, I wanted to hug you and remind you to have fun, but you had a different script to follow. A wave, some choreography, a fist bump with your dad. A short while later, they handed out the backpacks and repeated rules we’d already memorized. You have twenty minutes. No areas are off-limits. Take whatever you can find, as long as it fits in your bag. The team with the most valuable haul wins.
Each episode has a theme. In one, contestants fill their bags with clothes. In another it’s groceries. In another it’s electronics—some straight out of the box and others on their way to landfills. Sometimes only a few items are valuable and everything else is junk. Sometimes winning is about speed, or how well contestants pack their bags, how they arrange bulky items to maximize space. The right strategy depends on the situation, which reveals itself only after the timer starts. More commonly there is no strategy at all.
I stepped into my harness and tightened the straps. A gigantic clock flashed 20:00.
A voice, a microphone. “Bag it!”
We ran.
5.
There was the time your dad and I disagreed about whether it was too cold for you to go without a hat. There was the time we disagreed about how many cookies you could have. There were the times we disagreed about how late you could stay up, whether a show about teenage ghosts would scare you, when you could use a tablet, how many hours a week, a day. When you could have your own phone.
There was the time your pet bunny died, the one you’d named Janie, and you made us wrap her in a piece of fabric you’d cut from your fuzzy blanket and we buried her in a shoebox next to the carrots.
There was the time a basketball hit your nose and blood came spilling out.
The time you fractured your wrist.
The time you stepped on broken glass with bare feet.
I talked about how growth follows healing. Your dad coached you to be tough. His words were the ones you liked better, the ones you repeated.
Probably the ending would have been the same no matter what, but maybe it would have been slow and sad and your dad and I would have mourned each other when it was over. It’s easier to find a turning point, though, to talk about a before and an after.
That afternoon I was off work, making dinner while you sat at the dining room table, busy with a report about birds. “Yes or no, Mom,” you said. “Do you believe that condors can go a hundred miles without flapping their wings?” The answer was yes, and there were videos to prove it. You’d dumped a box of colored pencils onto the table and were drawing a picture for the cover. “Black and white for the wings,” you told me. “Orange and pink for the head.”
I needed an onion, so I made a quick run to the grocery store. It was no big deal; I’d done it plenty of times before. You hardly noticed me leave. Outside the winter sun was setting in a weak orange band to the south. When I returned, no more than twenty minutes later, the sky still held some light.
The front door was open and a strange man stood inside the house, shifting his weight from foot to foot like he didn’t trust the floor. By strange I mean a stranger. His face was—I don’t know. What I remember is his shirt, buttoned up to the top and with sleeves that were too long and fraying at the ends.
I rushed inside and stood between him and you. “No. You can’t be here.”
You’ve never told me what happened before I got there, but I’ve imagined you frozen in disbelief. I’ve imagined the way you must have wished yourself small, or invisible. I’ve imagined different men and different outcomes and what I would have done if I’d come home and you were gone.
I’ve told myself it was nothing. The man let me lead him outside, his only protest a dusty, whispery sound, like he was made of crumbling wood. On the sidewalk, with a latched gate between us, I offered to call someone but neither of us could think of anyone to call. Before he wandered off he looked past me, at the front door, the depth of his eyes suggesting a history I wasn’t ready to know. It was only later that I wondered if your bedroom used to be his.
How can I say it was nothing, though?
I found you upstairs, holding the fist-crumpled page you’d been drawing on earlier. We shuddered together on the bathroom floor with no space between us, and I didn’t know what else to do but ask about your report, to listen as you talked about ten-foot wingspans and thinning eggshells and population declines, scientists who climb into nests and collect garbage, who swap out a fertile egg from a pair in captivity for an infertile one from a pair in the wild. These ugly facts rang in my head, the gut punch that you were old enough to learn them, to write about them, to draw them.
How long did we sit there? I remember telling you that a little blonde girl could walk into a stranger’s house and they’d write a book about her, but if a bear walked into her house, every bear within a hundred miles would be in trouble. Maybe you listened and were thoughtful. Maybe we were getting somewhere.
But then your dad came home and whipped out his phone to report a home invasion, loud enough for you to hear. When he said, “the guy is probably still out there trying doorknobs,” you looked up at him with wide eyes.
His hand on your shoulder. “You’ll be okay, bud-bud.”
That night, after you finally got to sleep, I sat in your room watching nest-cam videos. Every egg was a victory, every hatched juvenile, but sometimes the parents went out looking for bone and shell to feed their chicks and brought back bottlecaps or glass instead.
Biologists became nurses or nannies—they climbed trees or rappelled heroic into cliff openings, because these were the birds that counted, the ones that soared bold across the landscapes of the American West, like advertisements. As morning approached, I nodded off, woozy with almost-dreams about snails and beetles and slow-moving fish that nobody cared about. Drought and fire and plastic and jet fuel and the people who searched for unlocked doors, for a doorway back to some better time. They were all mixed up in my head: the same edge, the same oblivion, the same end.
How can I say it was nothing?
◊ ◊ ◊
There was the time of blame.
There was the time of separation.
“Yes or no, Mom. Do you believe I sleep more hours when I’m with Dad?” The answer was yes, and there was a watch you wore at night to prove it.
At his apartment, you didn’t triple- and quadruple-check the locks. You didn’t worry that the fraying man would find you at the ice cream store or the park in his neighborhood. Your dad bought you a punching bag that wasn’t a bag at all but a man’s face, a chiseled torso with no arms for fighting back. You strapped on little boxing gloves and stepped onto a stool so you could reach his nose, his forehead, his neck.
6.
The ones who edit the footage control the story, and so we became a few seconds here, a few seconds there, cut together to show us at our worst. Evidence to support a larger thesis. Each episode repeats an experiment. The viewer, after watching only a few of them, can infer a conclusion.
If you pit warring parents against other warring parents, what happens?
The answer is always the same: terrible people being terrible.
◊ ◊ ◊
In their wall-bright room, removed from the competition, the children are irreproachable. They soldier through dance moves, gorgeous and magnetic. They are backlit in orange or hot pink or chartreuse or goldenrod. They are given healthy snacks and comfortable chairs, although we note that they prefer to stand, to use the chairs only during those dramatic moments that require them to collapse in disbelief. On video screens they watch footage captured by drones that find the best angles, that are more agile than the contestants themselves.
As you watch, do you wonder:
Will my team win? Do I have the best parents?
Or is it:
Which parent loves me best?
7.
At the starting line, there were shoulders and elbows. Bodies falling. A man yelling as I hurdled over him, fleet as a gazelle. Our theme was Treasure. Wooden chests were everywhere, adorned with gold paint, open and overflowing like props from pirate movies, spilling out acrylic gemstones and play-money coins. It was a grab-as-much-as-you-can episode, a needle-in-a-haystack episode. No strategy except fill our bags and hope for valuable bycatch.
Your dad with his caves. Me with my heights. I ran for the tallest ladder and clipped into the ropes. As I climbed, a safety net swept into place below me. A narrow ledge, another ladder, another ledge. The way I moved for you, the way I reached into each gap in the rock and took and took and took. Could you see this as you watched? A handful for the times we collected acorns in the park. A handful for the times we fed goats at the petting zoo. A handful for the stories you made up in bed before you fell asleep. My hands are not huge, but they knew how to pull me along, from memory hold to memory hold. You saw this, didn’t you?
◊ ◊ ◊
With the backpack full, I was an ore ship riding low in the water, struggling under its weight and searching for my misplaced center. I’d prepared for this, though, practiced tandem rappelling with fifty pounds hanging below me. Riding the pig, they call it. And so I rode it, ledge to ledge to ledge to ground, arriving with an ugly clatter. With less than two minutes to go, I hoisted the pack onto my shoulders and lunged into the mass of frantic parents, all of us stumbling toward the finish line with more precious cargo than we could carry.
We jostled and pushed. With the finish line in sight, a lurching boot pinned my right foot to the floor. Balance. I saw the word the way I’d written it, in neat blue letters, but I was a woman falling. We were two women entangled. We took a third with us as we fell.
Those moms tho – idiots
With the dads you kinda expect it but like why do these ladies think they can carry that much?
That ladypile – ngl that’s funny.
Greed. That’s what this is.
You in the orange room, raising a hand to your shattered face.
◊ ◊ ◊
After the episode aired, though, a couple of your dances went viral. You became a #bagitkid and offered the world your performing heart, a tiny light that screamed out into all the noise: listen to me.
A game changer. Maybe it was.
◊ ◊ ◊
Sometimes when I watch the episode, I skip ahead to the woman on the ground, the one with the broken ankle who tries to drag her pack, who can’t drag her pack, who never crosses the finish line. Come on come on don’t stop, a man yells, even as the clock flashes 00:00, even as an EMT rushes to the woman’s side.
What she thinks, lying there defeated, is that pain can force a type of meditation. The burdened mind, when pushed to shift its focus to the body, finds clarity.
8.
It starts the same: harness, gazelle, ladder, ledge. But I ignore the treasure chests and train my eyes to differentiate the browns and the grays, to discover the seam where walls meet rock. There must be places where the mountain cracks open like a geode to reveal a glittering vein, and so I push deeper, into the cool cavern air, through a fissure, a rupture, a gash. A distant fleck of light guides me—proverbial, metaphorical; it doesn’t matter how it’s there. Sideways flattened, I crawl, a few inches more and a few inches more, until the mountain does split. It gapes and brightens and leads me, gasping, to the other side.
In this fantasy, you’re with me, the two of us crouched down inside a cliff opening, squinting out into the hot, white day. I open my pack and scoop junk into it: bottlecaps and broken glass and ammunition casings, imagining the nest that was here before, that will be here again. Do you imagine this too? Or in your mind is it already too late?
We step out onto a ledge and stare out at the unreal sky, a shade of blue that can’t be named, though every generation has tried to own it, to say it belongs to them.
If only we knew how to fly, you say.
There’s still time, I promise, but it sounds more like a lie or a wish, like blind, fledging hope. All I know how to teach you is to follow the rocks.
Climb or rappel? I ask.
Instead, we sit at the edge and let our feet dangle. We look out over the disordered hills that dictate the shape of the earth, that dip like a scowl and grade into green. Not enough water, though. Not as much as before. Drought smells like sunbaked rocks, like cheatgrass, like smoke, like the wondering sage, so patient between rains.
Your phone lies flat in your palm. It’s all of your frustrations made solid, but instead of hurtling it down into the helpless abyss, you stand, inspired, and choreograph a new dance move. You teach me: where to put my feet, my hands, when to spread my arms. You record me. I record you. We laugh. Rain is coming, you type and upload us, send us skyward.
Now we wait.
At one thousand views, clouds gather. At ten thousand views, they grumble and stir. At twenty thousand views the wind warns us back inside the cliff opening, and we hunker together, drinking up the feral smell of wet rocks and thunder.
Yes or no, Mom, you say, but the rain tat-tat-tatting against the cliffs makes you pause. Or maybe that’s me, listening for the million thoughts in your head that nobody has heard yet, ready to learn, to be better, to say yes, yes, I believe.
K.L. Anderson is an ecologist and author of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize-winning novel But First You Need a Plan. She lives in Seattle.
