After the fact, after the sheriff’s department wrapped up its investigation and people had begun to move on, the photos on the wife’s phone came into my possession. How this happened, I’m not at liberty to disclose (or actually, I choose not to, at least not for the purposes of this story, which in any case isn’t much more than a rough go at the screenplay to follow). Suffice to say I have my means and that the wife’s sister, Lorna, has given me her blessing because she wants the story told in a more poignant and imaginative way than what the news outlets have been able to muster, and if we’ve discussed various A-listers who might be induced to play her sister, Pili, and Pili’s husband, Louis, that’s only to be expected — that’s the way the industry works, top to bottom, from the studio heads to the showrunners to the producers and writers and the earbud guys on the security detail, everybody envisioning the best-case scenario and hoping, literally, for the stars to align. But of course you’ve got to have a script first, and to have a script you’ve got to have a story, and this one has all the elements, believe me.
A family goes for a hike and disappears, husband, wife, infant, dog. They’re experienced hikers in their thirties, the infant smeared with sunblock and accustomed to bumping along in his BabyBjörn backpack for hours at a time through the chaparral and up and down the most challenging grades, the dog an indefatigable Jack Russell named Harvey. It’s a Sunday in August and this is a day hike only, since both Pili and Louis have work the next morning (in the actual case, he was an aerospace engineer commuting three days a week to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and she the assistant manager of the local B of A branch, but if we go for a fictionalized version, which is my preference, give them any professions you want; I’d like him better as a climate scientist modeling future weather patterns and her as an influencer keying on hiking apparel, which would underscore the irony — and tragedy — of what befell them). At any rate, no one hears from them, and when the nanny shows up at the house at seven on Monday morning, no one’s home, no baby squalling, no terrier ricocheting off her shins, no odor of cooking, no Pili, no Louis. She tries their cell phones, but there’s no answer, so she calls Lorna, the sister.
Lorna wasn’t all that worried, at least not at first. She too tried their cells and came up with nothing, and she told the nanny to just tidy up as usual and check back with her the following day. The most likely explanation was that Pili and Louis had gone for a day hike and most likely in the local mountains since they had work in the morning. They were both fit, Louis a dedicated swimmer and jogger and her sister a Pilates fanatic. The only thing she could think was that their car had broken down, though it was only two years old, and even if it had, they carried Triple A, so that wouldn’t have been a problem. Or maybe, she thought, because it had been so hot lately, they’d treated themselves to a motel with a pool and Jacuzzi after a sweltering hike and slept through the alarm the next morning, the morning neither of them showed up for work and the nanny found the door locked and the alarm set and nobody home. They were welcome to their privacy in any case — and spontaneity, if that was what this was. If they wanted to shut off their phones and have time to themselves, that was between them and whoever oversaw their schedules at work. A pool. A Jacuzzi. Best-case scenario.
A day later, when there was no word from either of them, she called the police, and the police put out an alert. The day was scorching, up into triple digits by late afternoon. The sun was like a hammer. Nobody was going anywhere. And yet somebody must have been out there, because a call came in about a car that matched the description of their vehicle, which had been found at the Pinyon Canyon trailhead in the national forest, not twenty-five miles from their apartment in downtown San Roque. Search and Rescue went into action, though by the time they got to the trailhead, night was coming on with its spooky primordial hush, the canyons haunted, snakes and scorpions and whatever else rustling around in the undergrowth. Arroyo toads. Roadrunners. (Do they have roadrunners out there? I’ll have to look that up.)
It wasn’t till 3:00 a.m. that two of the searchers came across the family’s bodies at the base of the steepest section of the loop trail, the section that would have led them back to their car in just over a mile and a half. The husband, Louis, illuminated by the thin tubes of light cast by the headlamps the searchers wore, was sitting upright, frozen in position, the dog sprawled beside him and the child laid out on a thin cloth blanket at his feet. Pili was found a hundred yards farther up the slope. There were no signs of foul play, just the night and the shadowy motionless forms beside the path.
Later that day, it was all over the news.
Which was when I got involved, the story irresistible — the tragedy, the mystery, the loss of innocent lives, nature in the raw, human fragility — but I was on another project then, an interracial love story set in a hippie commune in the late 1960s, which, unfortunately, never got off the ground. I saved the news clippings, though, and downloaded a dozen online stories, all of which reproduced the same scant frustrating details that only served to deepen the intrigue. By the time I got around to contacting Lorna, a month later, there’d been two or three others ahead of me, looking for background on the family, facts to flesh things out, and all of them seeing the same potential in the story I saw, but for one reason or another, Lorna didn’t hit it off with any of them, who, as she put it, “are only interested in sensationalizing the story,” and, left unsaid, profiting off it. Which, of course, I intended to do myself — that’s what this business is about — but my approach is subtler, classier, more interested in the characters as living, breathing human beings and not just victims. I wanted to get to the essence, wanted to know not just what happened but how it affected their understanding of themselves and the world that had suddenly turned on them in such a harsh and unforgiving way.
To this point, the police hadn’t weighed in, their investigation ongoing. Healthy people didn’t just sit down and die — there had to be some X factor involved. Almost immediately, investigators ruled out murder (no signs of trauma) and suicide (toxicology reports showed no trace of any foreign substances in the victims’ blood). There was speculation that they might have refilled their water bladder from the thin trickle of a creek at the bottom of the canyon (if they could have managed to negotiate those slick handholdless cliffs that were like something out of North Face, only without the snow) and somehow ingested toxins from a mineral seep or maybe an algae bloom, but testing revealed nothing of the sort. Lorna twisted in agony over the uncertainty of it as day after day went by and nothing was settled, no relief, no closure. I was on the phone with her then, several nights running, comforting her, even before we met face-to-face. When finally the police issued their report, it was a monumental letdown, the cause of death given as heat exhaustion. Heat exhaustion? It didn’t seem possible. Even the dog? I really couldn’t get my head around it — so you got overheated, so you felt exhausted, but did that mean you were looking at something fatal?
Those of you who follow the news will probably know the story from here, about how I got involved and found myself in the deepest well of the deepest shit, but that’s another movie (and who are we going to get to play me, I wonder? Somebody younger, slimmer, with more and better distributed hair and a photoshopped neck). Believe me, I learned a lot of things on a lot of levels from this story, not only about the business I’m in but also about my own judgment or lack of it and what that family was really facing out there in the wild — but maybe the best way to approach it for my purposes here is the photos. And the texts, don’t forget the texts.
. . . . . .
The first photo, taken at 7:20 a.m., is a standard family selfie, Pili and Louis smiling into the camera, the infant in her arms, the dog — wriggling — in his. The backdrop is the canyon itself, a war of paled-out colors glazed with sun, and no indication that the thermometer was going to top out at 110 that afternoon, because it was 7:30 in the morning and a nice equable 69 degrees, according to Google Weather. What can I say about this picture? It’s so ordinary, so usual, you wouldn’t have picked it out of ten thousand just like it. Happy family, happy dog. A day off. A small adventure. Secreted in Pili’s daypack, along with the bladder that held three liters of water, were the two ten-ounce bags of Lay’s potato chips and the jack cheese–and-onion sandwiches on rye, with sprouts and Dijon mustard, they intended to savor in some shady nook at the bottom of the trail before they climbed back up out of the canyon and drove home and put their feet up and watched something on Netflix or HBO with the air conditioner on full blast.
The next photo, time-stamped at 8:01, shows the trail ahead of them, an expanse of foot-worn dirt wide enough to accommodate two people abreast and rising to a point in the near distance marked by a yellowish (sandstone?) boulder that looks massive, though it’s hard to tell, because there’s nothing there for perspective. But photo number three puts Pili into the picture, slouching against the boulder (yes, it’s big, very big, like a couple of SUVs stacked one atop the other) and smiling at the photographer, Louis. Behind her, the trail narrows and plunges down a steep grade to where you can see the thin reflective band of the creek far below. She’s wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt as blue as the sky rearing above her. The sun is there, a blast of light caught in the upper lefthand corner, obliterating its designated segment of the sky.
Then they’re going down the trail, Louis taking deliberate steps with the baby on his back, careful not to lose his footing on the scree here, feeling the steepness of the descent tugging at his knees and the long muscles of his thighs — the quadriceps — and no time to stop for pictures, because this is what they’ve come for, the challenge of the descent that gives you that natural bodily rush that’s like being high on the purest drug in the world. Everything’s loose underfoot, random pebbles shooting out from the soles of his boots as if he’s walking on marbles, and it’s a question of bracing himself, which he does, pushing off one boulder after another, grabbing hold of mesquite branches as if they’re lifelines, the sun knifing in under the brim of the baseball cap he’s wearing (the Angels, a loser team; for the movie, I’d give him a Dodgers cap). But the thing is, he’s concerned — wouldn’t want to take a tumble with the baby — but confident too, because this is the sort of thing he’s done a thousand times, before and after the baby, even while Pili was pregnant, because it’s in his DNA, in Pili’s too. And don’t call them selfish or risk-takers or anything like that — they knew what they were doing, and as parents, what better way to awaken a love of nature in the kid from the very earliest age?
Next in the sequence is a photo taken at 9:22, another family selfie, though the dog isn’t in it, and the baby in his pack is just a shadow clinging to his father’s back, probably asleep at this point. There’s no trace of anything unusual in either of their faces, and here they are smiling for the camera, though they’re both sweating and Pili’s tee is damp with it, gone from sky blue to a dark azure. She’s very pretty, by the way, confident eyes, dimples, her hair pulled back and sculpting her face, and Louis is better-looking than average himself. Not that it matters, because the actors we have in mind are the very epitome of beauty, which is why they’re the A-list actors recognized around the world and the rest of us aren’t. I’m just mentioning Pili’s and Louis’s looks because of the epic finality of what happened here — and I know, I know, tragedy strikes the attractive and unattractive alike, we’re all susceptible, life a crapshoot, et cetera, but still, they were a handsome couple.
And where are they in this shot? Have they made it all the way down to the narrow bleached-out ridge above the streambed? Or are they on their way back up? Hard to say. When I went down there myself, documenting practically every step on my smartphone, I couldn’t manage to place this shot at all. It was hot, though, I can tell you that, and no shade, not a scrap of it, nothing. What made it even worse was that so much of the vegetation had burned off in the last big fire here, so that for long stretches there weren’t even any bushes to block the sun, however negligibly. Me? I almost died out there — and I was lugging two gallon jugs of Crystal Geyser spring water that felt like bowling balls careening around in my backpack. Beyond that it was sunblock, a sandwich, binoculars, though if I had it to do over I’d have brought a parasol at least and, though it might seem ridiculous when you’re talking temps over a hundred, one of those space blankets for the temperature drop at night. But I didn’t plan on being there overnight. And they didn’t either. Day hike, right? Not a major expedition, not a camping trip, not a night hike. But the real kicker, the thing that condemned them and pushed me to the brink myself, was the lack of cell reception out there, but then what are you going to do, carry a rocket pack? Wave at the space station when it comes whipping by overhead? Send up carrier pigeons? (Which would have died of heatstroke anyway.)
The fifth picture, taken at 11:30, before things started to go south in a hurry, is just a conventional shot of the scenery, the trail, the shrubs, the distant ridge above, the unfiltered sky. They were beginning to feel the stress at this point, the baby wrapping himself around a thin choking wail of distress, the dog panting like a machine. How much water was left in the bladder? Was the baby okay? Was the dog? And how much farther did they have to go, anyway — it was just two miles, wasn’t it? Two miles was nothing. But it was hot, hotter than it had any right to be, and the way back was all uphill. “We’ve got to stop,” she said.
Heat exhaustion leads to heatstroke, so Google says. Your body temperature rises, your muscles cramp, your head pounds, your skin turns a bright searing red and it’s hot to the touch, as if you have a fever — which you do, a full-body fever that can go as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and the worst thing is you stop sweating to conserve water, cutting off the body’s internal air conditioner. Louis saw the blaze of color in his wife’s face, and all he could think was that she had the worst sunburn of her life. He said, “I didn’t realize it was going to be this hot.”
“Give me the baby,” she said.
So they stopped — right there in the middle of the trail. Everything was bleached of color, but for the crippled black limbs of the shrubs, rocks like rotting teeth, the whole scene neutralized under the blast of the sun, which was directly overhead now. (This was a place I was able to locate and photograph, incidentally, under the same blast of that sun, albeit a month later, and if I felt sick, if I felt desperate, just imagine what they must have been going through. I didn’t have a baby. I didn’t have a dog. Or a spouse. It was just me, and that was burden enough.)
Louis positioned himself to shade Pili as she laid the baby out on his little blanket (blue horses, blue cowboys, a scamper of little pink dogies) and changed him and tried to cool him with the last few mouthfuls of water from the bladder, but here was the dog, panting and nosing in, licking the moisture from the baby’s face even as Pili pushed him away. The baby’s mouth was thick with some kind of phlegm or froth, which she extracted with her fingers so she could put him to her breast and feed him, revive him, bring him back. But the milk wouldn’t come. There was nothing left in her to spare.
It was a moment, and though I have no ambitions to direct, not now or down the line either, I can’t help envisioning our top-of-the-wish-list actress here, emoting from the very pit of her being, her face a bright red blister squeezed around peeling lips and the farthest of faraway looks trapped in her eyes. (And no, I’m not going to name her because I don’t want to risk jinxing things at this stage of the game, okay?) The question is, what was Pili thinking? And Louis, what about him? Which of them knew first? Or was it just then dawning on them simultaneously? They were in trouble, sure, but there were less than two miles to go, and if they could just . . . get moving again . . . they’d be back at the car, in the car, with the air conditioner cranked and bottles of Fiji Water pressed to their lips . . .
Then there were the texts.
This was the most poignant thing of all, just heartbreaking, believe me, because pictures are only pictures, and here was the real deal — their fear and desperation tapped across the screen in real time. The first text went out to 911 at 11:45 — or would have, but for the way the mountains blocked their signal. It read: Can you help us? On Arroyo Seco Trail, out of water, baby overheating. The second, which they tried to send from farther up the trail, was recorded ten minutes later. Emergency! it read. Baby in distress. Arroyo Seco Trail near junction of Pinyon. Need help!
At this point, Louis had begun to fade. His speech was slurred and his eyes were losing focus. In the next moment, he sat heavily, as if somebody had pulled a chair out from under him. The dog laid its head in his lap, hyperventilating, its tongue beating at its dried-out lips as if it could somehow find moisture there. And the baby — the baby was silent, depleted, no more whimpering or fussing, a good baby, the best, no trouble at all, never any trouble. The baby. The baby. The baby.
Pili was feeling disoriented herself. She didn’t know what was happening — how could she? Again, she was an experienced hiker — she blogged about it, in fact, at least in my telling — and she must have heard all the warnings time and again, even transmitted them to her followers (who were in the thousands, very respectable; she was an authority, and her savvy about hiking paraphernalia and apparel was second to none), but warnings were for other people, weren’t they, not for her, not for Louis, not for her family . . . So it was hot. She’d been hot before. She’d hiked Death Valley, albeit in spring, and the Santa Catalinas, outside of Tucson, and she’d never had a problem. She was fit. Supremely fit. A lot better equipped to handle backcountry conditions than most people.
The thing with the heat is that it affects your thinking, as if you’ve been drinking on an empty stomach. Everything slows down on you, and you can’t seem to find your feet or remember where you are or even who you are. That was my experience, anyway. Maybe I’m not as young and fit as Pili and Louis were (I’m fifty-two, and of course, my profession does involve sitting behind a desk for hours at a stretch), but I’m a power walker and I do try to get out and exercise my legs most days, so I wasn’t a total dud. And yes, I could stand to lose some weight — who couldn’t? But I stopped smoking years ago, and I never touch a drink before five o’clock, depending on who I’m with and whether it counts as an official meeting or not. Of course, at this point you might ask why I bothered to go out there and put myself at risk in the first place, which was my girlfriend Becca’s reaction.
“Can’t you just make it up?” she demanded, giving me her acidic/incredulous look as I stuffed things in my backpack the day before I drove all the way out there from L.A., and I told her what I’m going to tell you — nothing beats authenticity, and I pride myself as a writer who gets it right every time out. If I’m going to presume to know what my characters are feeling under duress, then I need to feel it myself. Call it a kind of method acting for the page.
. . . . . .
Pili was the fitter of the two — or maybe she handled the heat marginally better, everyone’s susceptibility as different as their genetic makeup — but at this point it was adrenaline that was keeping her going. She had to get up that hill, get to the car, dial 911. She pictured an ambulance, stretchers, a helicopter — wasn’t that the way they did it for the extreme cases, fly in with a salvatory roar and the big rotors beating at the air? She wanted to tell Louis what she was doing so he wouldn’t think she was deserting him, but words form on the tongue, and her tongue had lost its elasticity, as if it were an anonymous lump of meat someone had jammed between her teeth, so she gestured to him, dipping one shoulder and pointing up the trail ahead. He didn’t respond. His breathing was rapid, his eyes fixed on something she couldn’t see, something in the distance, where the sun came down to pound the rock ledges that were the naked skin of the mountain and so pocked with blemishes she couldn’t begin to take them all in. What I wanted was for her to say something and him to respond, and it didn’t have to be a major speech, which wouldn’t work under the circumstances, but just the rudimentary syllables we fall back on when everything else is stripped away.
“I’m going to get help,” she said, and mustering everything he had left, he murmured, “Quick, make it quick — ” and there was no more to say. He was sitting upright still, shielding the baby from the sun in the irregular patch of shade cast by his torso. The dog was stretched out beside him, eyes shut, tail limp. “Okay,” she said, and repeated herself, “okay,” and found herself moving, thinking, The baby, the baby, the baby.
She kept her head down, watching her feet. She tried to count her steps as a kind of mantra to distract herself from the way the trail just kept rising and rising, but she had the worst headache of her life and couldn’t concentrate even on a task as rudimentary as that — ten became nine and nine became twenty and twenty was two hundred, or was it three? Her vision began to blur. It was all she could do just to maintain her balance. Ultimately, the dirt was all there was, dirt ground to dust, to particles, each of the millions upon millions of them coruscating like miniature stars in their own miniature galaxies, which was exactly what I was seeing when finally I had to give it up and collapse in the pathetic strip of shade cast by an outcrop just off the trail. I was in trouble and I knew it. My feet were blistered. The back of my neck was so sunburned, the skin was already flaking. I had half a jug of water left at that point, and I lifted it to my mouth, all the while telling myself I had to conserve it even as I dug out my phone and texted the first futile SOS. Call me a fool. Tell me I deserved what was coming to me. Tell me I asked for it. But unlike Pili and Louis, I’d let somebody know where I was going (Becca), and though I’d tried to downplay any potential danger with her — “It’s a hike, that’s all, and I’m totally prepared, trust me” — she insisted I call her when I got back to the car. “And if I don’t?” I said, just to mess with her, and she said, “Those people died out there.”
But Pili. She thought the incline was evening out, that she was almost at the top, and it energized her, but then she made the mistake of looking back over her shoulder and saw Louis, the dog, and the baby right there behind her, so close she could have thrown a stone and hit them. Everything was jumbled in her mind at this point. Her blood pressure was dropping. She couldn’t swallow. Why she’d gone off the trail was anybody’s guess, but they found her in the chaparral, stretched out at full length, as if she were home asleep in bed.
I was luckier. The water held out, sip by precious sip, until night came creeping up the canyon walls and the sky overhead went black and the heat became the cold, and I shivered till dawn and got up and started off in the wrong direction. At some point, I heard voices and shouted out for help, and there they were, two guys in khaki shorts and long-sleeved shirts who could have been the same pair who’d found Pili and Louis and the baby, but weren’t.
. . . . . .
The county sheriff was furious with me. He read me the riot act about wasting the department’s time and resources and needlessly putting the lives of the rescue party at risk, let alone getting them out of bed in the middle of the night. “What do you think this is, a game?” he demanded, sitting there in the cab of a 4×4 parked at the trailhead, the red light revolving fitfully, the sun just putting in an appearance over the peak behind us, but I wasn’t going to go there. I told him I was fine and insisted I didn’t need any medical attention — just water, thank you — which to my mind put an end to it. “Is that it?” I demanded. “Am I free to go?”
In the article the local paper ran (and the news services picked up), he made a number of unflattering insinuations about my state of mind and my character too. “Let the family mourn,” he said. “Respect people’s feelings. A stunt like this just makes things harder on everybody. And for what — a movie?” Becca took a similar tack when I got home, but I really couldn’t understand her, because isn’t tragedy what stories, novels, and screenplays are all about? That and love, which in most cases is a kind of tragedy in itself.
I brooded over it for a day or two, and then I began to rethink the whole thing. Pili and Louis were real — actual people in the actual world, not just verbal constructs on a computer screen, and they deserved more. Much more. They’d suffered and died through no fault of their own, and I realized it was in my power to resurrect them, defy the odds, give the audience what they wanted, what I wanted, what we all want. And the infant, what about the infant who never had a chance at life? I see I haven’t even named him here, as if he were no more than a prop, and that’s just wrong. Inexcusable. I don’t know what I was thinking.
He was eleven months old. His name was Aaron Joshua Lingermann, and he had his father’s coloring and his mother’s dancing hazel eyes. Under other circumstances — if it had been less hot, if the trail hadn’t been so steep, if the fire hadn’t burned off all the cover, if their water had held out — he would have made it. And maybe, with a little luck, he would have lived a long and full and rich and surprising life.
I was thinking of titling the script Can You Help Us?, by the way, but Becca thought it was too vague, because who’s the first pronoun referring to? Me? You? Everybody in the world who wasn’t out there on that sun-blasted trail on what Google says was the third-hottest day of the year? I like the existential pull of it — Can you help? Can you? Can anybody? — but where’s the hope? What’s the upside? How is the audience going to feel when the lights come up? I could have been dead out there myself, but that didn’t happen, did it?
What I want is for you to see that ridge looming above Pili till it might as well be a fragment of the sky. I want you to feel the weight of the sun, taste the aridity in the back of her throat, hear the pounding of her heart. Look at her, watch her: She’s an iron woman, unconquerable, indomitable, forcing herself upward step by agonizing step, her face clenched, her eyes gone hard. Up she goes, up and up, the camera tracking her from all angles . . . until at the crucial moment, when everything hangs in the balance, there she is at the top, her figure triumphantly outlined against the blue infinitude of the sky. We see the rutted dirt lot with its fringe of spindly brush and a faded metal sign warning of a puma sighting on a date long expired. Tire tracks. A crushed can or two. And the car, right there before her, right where they’d left it.
In the next moment, she’s got a water bottle pressed to her lips and her fingers are working at the keypad of her phone, and then she’s hurrying back down the trail with water for Louis, the baby, the dog, and before she’s halfway down, here comes the chopper in a starburst of light. What world is this? The world idealized, the way it should be, the way it has to be if we’re going to go on living in it, this world, our world.
Cut to Louis’s face. His eyes flicker open. Everything is hushed. The camera draws back until we can see the baby and the dog lying beside him, and it holds there a moment before the baby lets out a sudden sharp squall and the dog begins to thump its tail, one slow beat at a time.
