Evelyn is still trying to catch hold of one of the tray handles below the surface of the water with the lab tongs. She’s leaning forward now, her face turned to one side and away from the stinking heated steam. I don’t like the simple lab tongs in this set of circumstances. The handle on each slide tray is little more than a thin strip of aluminum that protrudes out over the tops of the slides, and it all looks too much like one of those kid games in the supermarket rigged with a crane-like claw that’s supposed to snatch up a stuffed animal but rarely does. I can already see the egg slicer and its twenty-five precious slides taking a tumble and drifting silently to the bottom of the hot spring.

“Don’t you have anything better to do that with?” I say.

“This is it,” she says, still probing.

“Maybe something with a hook would work better than that.”

“That’s an idea,” she says, nodding a quick, acknowledging yes in my direction. But then, as if it is that rare stuffed toy caught up in the grip of the claw, she lifts the slide tray up and out of the bubbling water and sets it down on the disinfected sheet of aluminum foil in front of us.

From here, my job is simple. I open a Falcon tube and hold it upright, and with a sterilized needle-nose lab tweezers Evelyn slides a whole glass slide lengthwise into the tube and the fixative contained within. Then I screw the cap back on tight, label it with a black marker––you don’t want to know about the labeling system––wrap it around the top with Parafilm, a waxy plastic material that will stretch and ensure against leaks, and then wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil and set it inside a red-and-white Igloo cooler full of ice.

I am thankful we’ve moved on to tackling the slide trays. This is our first day out. Though I’ve done a fair job so far, I’ve botched a few things already. I accidentally kicked an open bottle of ethyl alcohol into the hot spring; I mislabeled fifty water samples with the time and date and sample number so that neither Evelyn nor I could tell which was which and we had to do them all over again; I put an unsheathed knife into my backpack and reached in and sliced the back of my hand from the little finger to the wrist––we had to stop and bandage it up as best we could––my DNA all over the place. Evelyn was her cool-headed self, though, taking things in stride, staying pretty calm, knowing that I was a fill-in and doing my best, though the mislabeling incident got her a little hot for a minute. She told me she wished I’d start thinking. I said I thought I already was.

Things are going well now, though, slide after slide plunging into those Falcon tubes, and I’m labeling (properly) and sealing and wrapping, but I’m no longer here, sitting beside this roiling hot spring in Yellowstone’s majestic Sentinel Meadows. I’m a million miles away and twenty-some years back in time, Evelyn and I lying flat on our backs in the sun on a little wisp of beach south of San Francisco, our thighs touching there, too.

It was a rare sun-heated day, the Pacific reaching out blue and calm to the horizon, the wind blowing seaward. We were allies in an alien world, Evelyn and I, Midwesterners who migrated west. There were no unanswered questions between us, no gaps, no distance to speak of. We had a small over-priced one-bedroom in the Western Addition, of all places––muggings out the windows and three floors below on a regular basis. Evelyn was trying her luck as a sophomore at Berkeley, and I was scratching the surface of things, playing piano for little or no money in places too ridiculous to mention. Filtered through memory, the ocean air seemed oddly golden, the sand warm and soft under our backsides. I remember I was reading a dog-eared copy of Joyce’s Dubliners I bought used for one dollar, and Evelyn was sound asleep, a textbook lying open and page-side down over her flat pink stomach. We were up after a time, though, and testing the always frigid, impossible Northern California waters, and Evelyn, the better swimmer, dipped in and frolicked among the waves for a quick minute or two. I wouldn’t go past my knees; it was too damn cold. Then we walked some distance along the water’s edge, the waves and swells frothing over our feet and ankles, and we talked about all the things we planned to do in our lives, how we were going to do them, where, when, and why, though by that time I was already thinking about the two of us getting back to the apartment and in the shower together, mica-flecked beach sand we brought home with us swirling at our feet and sliding down the drain.

I let go of the memory now, having fallen behind, and I screw the cap off a Falcon tube, hold the tube portion upright, and watch as Evelyn lowers a glass slide into the fixative solution, some of which comes very close to sloshing over the edge and onto my pant leg.

“Hey,” she says and half-smiles, though with some worry in it. “You better watch out.”

“Damn,” I say and screw the cap on the tube, wrap it with Parafilm, label it, wrap it in aluminum foil, and put it away in the Igloo.

We work quickly now that I’m back in rhythm, but I can’t stop thinking about those two on the beach, as I have been for some years now. Though there were some desperate times back then, all those years ago––the night Evelyn totaled our old Chrysler on the Nimitz in Oakland and was almost taken from me forever, the time I threw a pricey Yamaha PSR-300 PortaTone keyboard off the Golden Gate Bridge after a failed audition and Evelyn wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks, and those times when the money just ran out, which it seemed to do a lot; though there were desperate times all those years ago, those two on the beach, whoever they were (I’m not so sure anymore), had both feet planted firmly on that beach and in that little apartment in the Western Addition. The two here, sitting out along the lip of a steaming hot spring in good old Yellowstone, are another story. Each seems to have one good foot planted, and that’s fine, but the other foot isn’t quite there, isn’t as it should be.

With Evelyn’s work having blossomed the way it has, she’s been hopping from conference to conference, field site to field site, and dropping in on collaborators’ labs all over the world. She’s rarely home more than a week or two in two months’ time, and as much as I’m pleased for her having risen to these upper echelons of her profession, things are beginning to give a little around the edges.