Miriam had said New Orleans first, because that was what teenagers wanted—the French Quarter, beignets, ghost tours with flashlights and dramatic whispers. But Grandmother Catherine had said no. She had said the parks instead. "The parks," she'd repeated, as if Claire hadn't heard correctly the first time. "The real ones. The ones where you have to earn the view."

Claire, fifteen, had not argued. She had learned, in fifteen years of knowing her grandmother, that arguments with Catherine Endicott were exercises in futility. She was a retired historian, seventy-three years old, with opinions that had calcified into something resembling architectural steel, and she did not explain herself. She did, however, give reasons. "You learn who a person really is," she said, "in the places that don't perform for them. Disneyland tells you what people pretend to be. The Grand Canyon tells you what they actually are."

They flew to Phoenix and drove north, and the landscape changed the way a sentence changes when you remove the filler words—suddenly, everything was doing work. The Saguaros gave way to high desert, the desert gave way to something that wasn't quite mountain and wasn't quite plateau, and then, at the edge of a parking lot no bigger than a backyard, the world simply stopped and the canyon began.

Claire stood at the rim and did not say anything. She had been braced for impressive, for the kind of scenery you saw on screensavers and agreed with passively. This was not that. The canyon was a wound in the earth that had been healing for so long it had become something else entirely—a cathedral, a museum, an argument about time that made her own life feel like a parenthetical.

"There," Catherine said, standing beside her. Not pointing. Not performing. Just standing, in her sensible hiking boots and her cotton shirt that she'd owned for twenty years. "There it is."

They hiked down the next morning, the Bright Angel trail, in the early hours before the heat set in. Claire's knees hurt by the second switchback. Her grandmother moved ahead of her with the steady, unhurried pace of someone who had made peace with the body's limitations and refused to be limited by them.

"You hate this," Catherine said, on the third hour. It was not a question.

"I don't hate it," Claire said, which was true and also not the whole truth. The whole truth was that she didn't know what she felt. The canyon was doing something to her that she didn't have words for. It was making her small in a way that didn't feel like defeat.

"You're angry," Catherine said. "I can see it. In your shoulders."

Claire wanted to say: I'm angry because you won't tell me why we're here. I'm angry because you missed my last three birthdays. I'm angry because you show up now, out of nowhere, with a trip to national parks and you won't say the word even though I know, I KNOW, I've seen the way you touch your side when you think I'm not looking.

What she said was: "I'm fine."

Catherine looked at her for a long moment. Then she turned and kept walking.

At the bottom, where the river ran thin and brown and ancient, they sat on rocks and ate sandwiches from the cooler. A raft went by in the distance, three people in helmets waving at them, and Claire waved back, and for a second she was just a girl on a rock, waving at strangers, and it was almost peaceful.

"My mother," Catherine said. "Your great-grandmother. She brought me here once, when I was younger than you. I didn't want to come. I wanted to go to Hollywood. I wanted to see movie stars' houses."

"What changed?"

"She brought me anyway. And then she brought me again, three years later, and again the year after that. By the time I was your age, I had seen more of this country than most people see in a lifetime. She said it was an education. She said the rocks knew things that books didn't." Claire waited. "She was right."

They drove to Zion next, and the colors changed—not from brown to green but from the canyon's layered pinks and reds to Zion's white and bronze and the particular green of the Virgin River, which looked like it had been poured into the landscape by mistake, too alive for the surrounding stone. They hiked the Narrows, in the water, and Claire discovered that she could be cold in a way that went past the surface and into the bones, and she discovered that her grandmother, at seventy-three, could still laugh at her own discomfort.

"This is insane," Claire said, thigh-deep in water that had come from snowmelt somewhere high above them.

"This is wonderful," Catherine said, and she was grinning, actually grinning, and for a moment Claire could see the person her grandmother must have been at twenty, at thirty—the person she had apparently been, before she became distant, before she became the woman who sent birthday cards with checks and no notes, who appeared at holidays only when the schedule allowed, who had made Claire's mother the way she was: careful with love, stingy with it, convinced that affection was a finite resource that had to be hoarded.

At Yosemite, they hiked to the top of Glacier Point and looked down at the valley, which looked like something that had been designed by someone who had heard descriptions of valleys but had never actually seen one, who had then overcorrected into excess. Waterfalls everywhere. Cliffs that seemed to lean. A valley floor that was so green it looked like a fever dream.

Catherine sat on a bench and didn't say anything for a long time. Claire sat next to her, not sitting beside her—beside implied connection, and there wasn't that, not yet.

"I'm sick," Catherine said.

Claire's whole body went tight. "I know," she said, before she could stop herself.

"Your mother told you."

"She didn't have to. I can see it." It was the way her grandmother moved, slower than she should have been. The way she rested after every ascent. The way she had planned this trip with an urgency that she tried to hide but couldn't quite manage.

"Pancreatic," Catherine said. "Stage four. They gave me a year, maybe less. That was eight months ago."

Claire couldn't speak. The valley was still beautiful. The waterfalls were still falling. The world was still going on, indifferent.

"I wasn't a good mother to your mother," Catherine said. "I wasn't a good grandmother to you. I was busy being something else—being a professor, being an expert, being important. I thought there would be more time. I kept thinking there would be more time."

"Why didn't you tell us?"

"Because I didn't know how. Because I was ashamed. Because I spent my whole life studying how people faced endings and I still didn't know how to face my own." She turned to look at Claire, and her eyes were wet, and this was the first time Claire had ever seen her cry. "I wanted to show you this. These places. I wanted you to know what I knew—that the world is bigger than the small rooms we make for ourselves. That we're part of something that doesn't care about us and that this is not a cruelty, it's a gift, because we get to be here anyway. We get to be here."

Claire was crying now too, which surprised her. She hadn't known she had any tears left. She'd spent so long being angry.

"I hate you," she said, "for not being here."

"I know."

"I hate that you waited until now."

"I know."

"I don't want you to die."

Catherine reached over and took her hand. Her fingers were thin and dry and warm. "I don't want to die either. But I'm here now. Right now. That's what I have, and I wanted to give it to you. This trip. These places. This." She squeezed Claire's hand. "You don't have to forgive me. You don't have to like me. But maybe—maybe you could just sit here with me. For a minute. In this one place."

They sat together on the bench at Glacier Point, in the thin mountain air, watching the valley change as the afternoon light moved across it. The waterfalls caught the sun and became silver. The cliffs held their shadows and let them go. Somewhere below them, a deer crossed the valley floor, unhurried, certain of its destination.

Claire didn't forgive her grandmother. Forgiveness was too simple a word for what was happening, which was more like a landscape—varied, layered, full of ridges and surprises and things that didn't resolve into easy meaning. But she sat there. She stayed.

After a long time, Catherine spoke again. "Yellowstone next. Then the Tetons. Then maybe the coast." She paused. "If you're willing."

Claire looked at the valley. She looked at her grandmother, who was small and sick and trying, in her own graceless way, to say everything she'd never said.

"Okay," she said.

The sun moved another inch across the sky. The shadows lengthened. The valley held its beauty, held it and held it, asking nothing, offering everything.