Now that I’m here, I have no idea what to do!
I’m new to Arizona, new to this dead-end job answering phones. Everyone here hates me. I know because each morning we pick an empty cubicle to work in. I’m the early bird so get first crack: corner, with a window overlooking the courtyard. No one takes second best, next to me, also with a view, until Brett shows up, late, last to choose, always stuck next to me.
He’s way older than anyone else here, almost double. Maybe even forty. This mindless job is for people who front bands or slap paint across giant canvases or, like me, who plan to start grad school next fall. Brett drags in, lugging a mountainous backpack that looks like it’s traveled ancient trails. Sometimes he pulls something out of it that he places on my desk, some pinecone or rock or stick or leaf. People whisper he’s a crazy genius, that for twenty years he’s been tinkering around with some mysterious invention. But he’s terrible at this simple job, taking classified ads over the phone to print in Phoenix’s artsy, alternative weekly newspaper. We’re on commission, wanting long ads, charged by the word. “Describe your lost cat,” we’re trained to say. Or, “What kind of single white male are you looking to date?” Brett just types what they tell him. On calls he barely talks. I talk the most, asking tons of questions, because I want to know; because I want them to find their cat, to find a boyfriend. I’m at top commission, which also makes people here hate me.
Today, Brett peers at me over the top of the cubicle. His eyes are golden and so’s his long, wild hair. If he were an animal, he’d be a lion. If he were a crayon, he’d be copper, the best color in the big box. If he were a T-shirt, he’d be your favorite, softly rumpled. If he were a landscape, he’d be a rippling field of wheat stretching into a glorious sunset. It’s how I think, everything at once, no way to stop—which people hate. Maybe a smidge like the huge genius brain filling Brett’s beautiful head.
It’s obvious to everyone but Brett that I’m one hundred percent in love with him. Plenty of people who work here go out together. There’s no rule.
“I’ve got something for you, Pup,” he whispers, and I simply swoon inside even as I play cool: “Oh?” This special, secret nickname only for me’s a good sign.
He comes around the cubicle wall to stand next to me, smelling like orange peels, wearing an Adidas T-shirt and creased Levis. I only have dumb Iowa clothes like sweaters because my saved-up money went for rent and real sheepskin wheel and seat covers for my sun-steamed black car with busted air conditioning. I’m wearing a blue blouse and a skirt, like this is some kind of real job, where I’m climbing some kind of ladder.
“I was hiking the Superstition Mountains,” he says (instant jealousy: who with?), “and found this bird nest.” He holds out a wizened, pruney, stiff brown pouch the size and shape of a water glass. Nothing like the bird nests knocked into the yard after a storm when I was growing up in Iowa. Those were intricately woven grasses or supple twigs, lined with moss and leaves and meadowy loveliness. The spring after my best friend Donna disappeared, a nest crashed down from the maple tree on the border between our side-by-side backyards. Entwined with the grasses and nature stuff were long strands of Donna’s red hair. Donna had so much thickly magnificent hair that it was nothing for her to cut off hunks for fun, so we could watch it sail through the air on windy days. We were eleven when we did stuff like that, and because they never found her, I guess Donna’s still eleven.
“It’s for you.” He picks up my hand and sets the nest into it. It’s hard and cylindrical, knobby, like pottery or carved wood, a vessel or a seashell. Nothing like a cozy home. Brett says, “Wrens or woodpeckers peck through the saguaro, and the cactus forms this crust around the empty hole. Then the bird moves in, has babies. It’s even waterproof. Hard to find these, especially a big one like this.”
Why’s the special thing he brought just for me so ugly? Say, I love it. Unfortunately, I say what I’m thinking: “So actually it’s a scab. Or a scar. Something that hurts the cactus. What kind of home is that?”
Now he hates me. It’s what happens, that people tire of me fast. I’m too much for the world. No one says so that way, but that’s what it is. My mother left when I was twelve after she got tired of me.
Brett says, “It’s a saguaro boot.”
There’s nothing to do, so I squeeze most of my fist partially inside the boot. Scratchy. Practically an engagement ring, and I work hard not to say this because this isn’t the kind of joke people find funny, because maybe I can recover from calling his gift a scab, from saying a home’s a scar. I can be as cool as I’m pretending to be. “I love it,” I say.
His phone’s ringing because god forbid someone not place their ad selling their VW bus, and so’s mine, and the red light bops on, meaning our supervisor’s monitoring. In two seconds, she’ll zip over, yelling about us wasting time. Brett’s golden eyes meet my ordinary eyes, and he says, “Maybe that’s a dark view, Pup, but it’s your one-of-a-kind heart seeing the world. We need that.”
Lots of nights if I’m too revved to sleep, I sneak after hours into the hot tub at my apartment complex. I crank the timer as long as it goes, letting bubbles drone my mind blue like the water. (Okay, being technical, water’s blue because of painted cement, but that’s like calling a nest a scab, and I’m trying to learn.) In Iowa, a hot tub would be a Very Big Deal; after my mother abandoned me, my dad bought me an aboveground pool, so I’d have friends coming to our yard. Here, every apartment complex has at least one pool.
The only other late-night person I see is a leathery old man with a smile like a lizard’s and a straw hat (even at night), who carps about how his grown kids never visit from San Diego and Eugene. Sometimes he complains about not seeing the daughter who died in a car crash at nineteen, and when I interrupted with, “You can’t complain about someone dead ignoring you,” he snapped, “What, she’s too busy to haunt me?”
Arizona is my destiny. I didn’t come to Phoenix because ASU is the only graduate program in environmental science that accepted me like I told my dad. He’s a hotshot professor, so smart about things in books, who tells me I’ll need a PhD to make anything of myself in this sort of field. I’m here for my missing mother.
After she left, postcards came for me from cities—Minneapolis, Fargo, Saint Louis, Philadelphia. I kept track with thumbtacks on a wall map, waiting for the pattern of those tacks to spell my name or create a clue of when she’d be back. That’s what I’d send.
I reread her messages, looking for anagrams, acrostics, palindromes, and secret codes. I memorized every word, including descriptions printed on the postcard: “The Liberty Bell bears a timeless message: ‘Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.’” I showed them to my friends and teachers and taped them inside my locker door. Let my dad read them. I hid them under my mattress to force dreams about her, tied them round with red ribbon like letters from a lost love. They stopped at Phoenix, the only city with two postcards: one a picture of a rattlesnake and the other of a jackalope. “Is that where she’s living now?” I asked my father six months after. I was sixteen. All he had to do was say yes. But he said, “It was supposed to be a couple, to ease us through. Just until she came back.” He planned the postcards himself, asking former grad students in various cities to mail them to me. I hope he ends up a leathery man rambling out loneliness in an Arizona hot tub. Back then I said, “But I believed they were real,” and he said, “I wanted you to. I wanted to make this easier for you.” Turns out jackalopes don’t exist either.
Ballpoint, block lettering with bland, insipid sentiments: MISS YOU. WISH YOU WERE HERE. I’m so dumb. LOVE, MOM. Dumb, dumb, dumb! Why would a person who escaped me turn right around and suddenly miss me? I was a hard child to raise, with questions and neediness, and how I couldn’t sit still, with teachers constantly calling to set up conferences to figure out strategies for coping with my energy and enthusiasm and big feelings. Maybe if I’d been pretty, or not tall, or something.
I missed pictures of Paul Bunyan and the Gateway Arch. Examining the angles of each K in Krista, imagining my mother’s pen forming those lines. Even after learning my dad sent the postcards, I waited for one more. “Phoenix” is that interrupted conversation, where you realize you didn’t say the right things, where all you want is to try it all over again.
When I’m alone in the bubbling water late at night, unlit apartments circling the pool deck, I feel she’s somehow part of this city. I feel those postcards are real.
During the week after bringing me the saguaro boot, Brett hands me a tiny stone that almost but not quite looks like gravel from the parking lot, a shiny black bug he says is a carpenter bee, and, on Friday, a Lucite paperweight encasing a scorpion as long as my pinkie. “Take it home,” he says. “It’s lucky.”
“Not for the scorpion,” I say.
“We’re not the scorpion,” he says. “We’re the people with the scorpion in our hands.” He plucks at my fingers, wrapping them into a fist around the cool Lucite.
People don’t touch people they don’t like, right?
In the bathroom, I catch two girls shouting through two stalls: “Shouldn’t we warn Krista?” Flush, flush, and when their doors open, there I am, leaning up against a sink. “Warn me about what?” I ask. They wash their hands quickly, from the cold faucet. “The restaurant reviewer said the health inspector shut down BurgerRama,” one says, grabbing too many paper towels. “Roaches,” the other says, shaking her hands dry.
As they pull open the door, I say, “That’s not what you were talking about.” When they’re gone, I tell my face in the mirror: “Didn’t want to know anyway.”
Brett’s what they want to warn me about. I imagine a mother’s voice in my head, saying, “Don’t listen to those jealous girls.”
I went to a psychic when I was sixteen, with my friend Tracy. I begged her to come, promised to drive us in my new Ford Escort, a gift from my father (the one now with broken a.c.). We looked up psychics in the yellow pages, and there we were at Madame Sophia’s on Friday night, everyone else at the football game. Tracy chickened out, waited in the car like I knew she would. But I had to get this done.
Millions of beads everywhere, on strings hanging like a curtain from the ceiling, in bracelets up and down Madame Sophia’s arms, her inches-thick stack of necklaces. All the same beads, as if they’d come in a giant bucket and Madame Sophia strung them on fishing line.
She swooped her arms wildly over my happy life ahead, with a mansion and a job helping people. On and on, until I was embarrassed for her. I sat silently because Tracy warned me that fake psychics are alert for revealing clues like smiling or leaning forward. What hard work staying still. She was talking about my six children—three boys, three girls—and the amazing husband who’d adore me, and I was sure she was fake and that I’d wasted fifty bucks I’d saved from my job at the movie theatre when she halted mid-word. I started sweating so hard it felt like water dripped off my body onto the hard folding chair where I sat because she said, “Oh. It’s your mother.”
Tracy would be amazed at how quiet I was, not giving a tiny clue. But hearing “your mother” was like grabbing the flat part of a sizzling-hot iron. I was dying of thirst since all the water inside me had oozed out my pores.
Madame Sophia said, “You have a question about her.”
HOW DID SHE KNOW THIS? Every secret I hid felt splayed out like a frog on a dissection tray. Maybe I nodded.
Madame Sophia said, “First, ask: What peace can any answer bring when one question is the root of ten more?”
“I don’t know,” I said. A math problem? My brain was soggier than my body.
“Peace is knowing which questions have no answer.” Madame Sophia smiled. Her large teeth looked glossy, as if smeared with Vaseline, like Miss America contestants on TV. I waited and waited. Finally, her smile faded as she said, “The desert rivers are sand until the monsoons come.”
“That’s a riddle?” I asked.
One slow shake no. We stared at each other. Purest silence. She was me now, offering zero hints about what the heck she meant. Like in English class, scouring words for the symbols in the story where the guy doesn’t really jump off the bridge. I wondered what Tracy was doing in the car, who won the football game, if psychics were real. I couldn’t last another second: “Am I the monsoon?”
“No,” Madame Sophia said, sounding disappointed. “You’re the river.”
“I just want to know what happened to my mother after she left when I was twelve,” I said. “You’re the psychic. Where is she? Where’d she go? Why’d she do that?” I was expecting her to get weepy and sad for me, the way teachers did when I brought up my heartbreaking life.
She said, “Your mother is the monsoon.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Tell me something real, something I can know.”
“You’re thirsty because you’re in the desert.” She shoved bracelets up her forearms then shot them back down.
“I paid you my own money.” She wasn’t caring enough, so I added: “My mom’s gone. It’s not fair.”
She said, “Look in Phoenix.”
Finally! And wow! My postcards! Psychics are real! But to be sure, I asked, “You’re saying my mother’s in Phoenix?”
She sighed and said, “I don’t draw maps, kid.”
In the car, I told Tracy this answer was worth fifty bucks, and after I said that a couple times, Tracy agreed.
On Saturday, Brett’s meeting me at the Desert Botanical Garden, but he’s twenty minutes late, like it’s a workday. Maybe he lost track of time with his genius project. Yesterday our supervisor handed me two free tickets from some advertising promo, so it was natural to shout over the cubicle wall all casual, “Maybe you could come with me,” and he said, “Maybe I could.” He says I better learn about cactuses and stuff before we go hiking in the Superstition Mountains, outside Phoenix. (He really said “we”!) He tells me about the magical things out there, like piles of gold secretly buried in the Lost Dutchman’s Mine and rare crowning saguaros, with branches fanning out the top like a halo, like a crazy explosion of cactus arms all at once. He said, “The quiet slips through your mind, expands into perfection.” According to him, I need “a foundation of knowledge” before I can understand what it takes to appreciate the desert. It sounded smart the way he explained it.
While waiting, I poke around the gift shop and see a shelf of scorpion paperweights, $6.99 each. That’s depressing, so I turn to some fossilized fish, their tiny bodies pressed into a rectangle of beige stone. You even see the bones of their skeletons, and since no one’s watching, I brush my finger through the indentation, made millions of years ago. Fancy at $250.
Finally, there’s Brett, sweaty from riding his bike here, swinging free his giant backpack. Along with the sweat smell, there’s something as piney as a real tree that I inhale. I’m embarrassed to be sniffing him, so I say, “I love fossils.”
“Doors to yet another secret world,” he says.
Our supervisor asked me if Brett’s always stoned. I ignored her, but now I ask Brett, “Are you stoned?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “But not now. Does that bother you?”
I shrug but then say, “Nothing you could do would ever bother me.”
He laughs. “We’ll see about that, Pup.”
We walk through the outdoor garden on tidy, winding cement sidewalks along with slow-moving snowbirds wearing white tennis shoes. I read each descriptive plaque and explanation, trying outSpanish words and Latin. Brett doesn’t make fun of me. He’s wearing mirrored sunglasses, so I can’t see his golden eyes. They made him check his giant backpack, and he looks vulnerable without it, like a leg’s missing, like I need to take care of him. I tell myself he’s here because he likes me.
I say, “You’re really taking me on a hike in the mountains? You’re not just saying that?”
He says, “You really want to go with me?”
He must know that’s a dopey question, must know that I’m in love-love-love. I hold my breath so none of this explodes out of me, then say, “Might be fun.” Why must I always hide, and in plain sight?
We’re standing in front of a tall, rangy ocotillo, its spiky, green-leafed sticks radiating like spokes. I hear too much silence, so I read off the sign: “Fouquieria splendens.” Apparently, red flowers bloom on the spine-tips March through June.
“You bet,” he says, and I’m cozy-warm inside, but then he says, “Can I ask you something?”
No. No! Pre-asking—instead of just asking—is when the worst questions hit. Donna before she disappeared, asking if I noticed anything weird about her brother; my father asking if I thought maybe he and I could make a perfect team of two. Always, always my mother if we were alone together, like her driving me to school: “Can I ask you something, Krista?” then asking if I’d miss her if she died, if I’d notice she was gone, if I’d be better off without her. I want to wrap both hands tight around an ocotillo spike, crush my flesh into its thorny spines, scream out pain. I say, “That’s the nice way of telling me something I don’t want to know, right?”
He laughs. “Probably.”
I wait, wait, wait. A lady in a wheelchair rolls in next to us and Brett steps aside to create more space for her, which I think is nice. She reads the plaque out loud, like she needs to hear it to believe it. Some ocotillo live a hundred years, though sixty’s average.
He’ll ask. They don’t really expect permission to say what they want you to know.
Finally Brett says, “The desert’s the only place that feels real to me. Where feels most real to you?”
This isn’t it. I’m cautious: “What does that mean?”
“If we’re all from the earth, I came from the desert. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He looks at me like I’m going to laugh at him, and I almost do, from nervousness and relief and terror.
“I wonder where I came from then?” I ask.
“The stars,” he says, and then he kisses me—but on the dumb forehead. I want to feel only the gloriousness of this, but there’s too much still in my head, like wondering what he wanted to say, like thinking how perfect he is not to say it.
Later, after I learn a thousand things about a thousand desert plants, after sharing an ice cream sundae, after me watching him ride away on his bike, I wonder if any place feels real to me, and how much it matters if nowhere does? I’m in the hot tub, thinking this, listening to the thump and buzz of music in someone’s apartment. Eventually, that party spills over to the pool deck, people peeling off their clothes and tumbling into the blue water. Within minutes, they absorb me into their group, thinking I’m them, and we’re all laughing, and eventually I let a cute guy kiss me on the lips, for real, and I like it enough, but I know all I need to do is wait a little longer for Brett to catch up.
Still, she’s had more than ten years to find me. Am I tired of waiting or only used to it?
I couldn’t be enough for her—not pretty enough, not smart enough, not thin enough. Yet I was too much—too tall, too loud, too there. I remember eating ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins, hers always a single scoop cup of Jamoca, mine a double dip sugar cone packed with bubble gum or strawberry cheesecake, always the pink flavor family. Like, what’s wrong with pink? “Oh Krista,” she’d say, and I’d stuff down the whole thing, not because I was hungry, but because she wanted me not to. Her eyes burned scorn through me as she dropped her cup in the garbage, a quarter eaten. It’s not that I wanted her ice cream—coffee flavor’s bitter, which I know because one time, only once, I snatched her cup out of the trash and choked down Jamoca while people in the Baskin-Robbins stared.
I was too much. I still am. That’s why she left. That’s why people leave.
What I’ve noticed about the desert: It’s thirsty but won’t let you see that it is. Plants may be parched, yet they bloom. Cactuses grow tall, branch out their arms, clutch at the sky.
I see life everywhere. How is that too much?
I start a letter to my father: “I’m writing to you from a far-off country.” I like sounding interesting and dramatic, like these words might catch his attention, will make him read on. It’s true—Arizona feels like a far-off country, not like a corner of the actual United States. I’ll tell him all the cactus names I know, the Latin I scribbled on my hand that day in the Desert Botanical Garden with a ballpoint Brett had in his pocket. My dad won’t know what they mean, but he’ll know there’s something scientific going on which will impress him.
Half of my growing up was me and him, the two of us alone. He hid his girlfriends, but I knew. That way he’d shave carefully and longer on certain Saturdays. Or he’d tell me it was okay to stay out late on a particular Friday, that I should go to Pagliai’s for pizza after the football game with my friends, and he’d hand over twenty bucks. I’d drive to the library instead, tuck into an upstairs carrel until closing at nine.
Then I’d go to Pagliai’s and wait in my Escort past midnight, watching the swirl of classmates, guessing from their faces if we won the game. The twenty bucks? Under my mattress, into my fund to move to Arizona to find my mother. I imagined her doing this same thing, stockpiling my father’s money, eager to escape; imagined her watching over my shoulder as I count the bills stacking up. It’s my father she left, not me. I told myself that, then.
I reread my words to my father: “I’m writing to you from a far-off country.” I hope he thinks I’m in Thailand or Tunisia, even for just one minute, and I hope he’s deathly worried. Maybe he’ll think, “What the heck? What’s Krista doing now?”
Who am I mad at? He lied to me. I don’t fit inside a suitcase, into a new life.
He’s getting married in six weeks. Eloping to Hawaii, where his girlfriend’s always wanted to go. I’d go to Hawaii, I guess, except for this job. Except no one asked.
In my head, I string sentences for my letter, about working at New Times and Brett being the love of my life, about sitting in ahot tub whenever I want.
Instead: “Love, Krista,” I scrawl onto the bottom of this empty piece of paper, which I fold evenly in precise, sharp-creased thirds, as we were taught in ninth grade typing class where they trained us girls to be perfect secretaries. Into an envelope, lick shut, and print the address to my childhood home; stare at the words and numbers.
Maybe he’ll slit open my letter, studying it for clues as I did when my mother’s postcards arrived, when he handed each to me, saying, “Here you go, Krista. See how much your mother loves you.”
On Monday, I’m eating lunch with Brett in the courtyard that’s the view from our cubicle windows. For no good reason he announces he’s got an ex-wife living in Scottsdale. Then he tells me he has two children who live with their mother, who’s a different woman than his ex-wife. “She’s bitter,” he says, “so I barely get to see those boys.”
I stare into my yogurt cup. A thousand minutes trickle along.
Finally, I say, “Complications don’t scare me.”
Thousands more minutes.
Finally, he says, “You know we’re just friends, right?”
Oh. That’s why he’s telling me these things. I say, “Well, I’m probably a complicated friend myself.”
“Oh, Pup,” he says. “Only kind worth having.”
Something feels finished, but random questions bristle angrily inside me: like why cardinals get tiny red tufts on top of their heads but sparrows don’t, why chicken noodle soup tastes best on rainy days, why it’s exciting to find a feather in the grass, why dust glitters in sunlight but not lamplight, why it’s impossible to burn a marshmallow exactly right over a grill in a backyard but you can over a Girl Scout campfire. Why I don’t have a mother or best friend or Brett. What I did?
Now Brett’s talking about his favorite thing, all the exciting parts of the future, when we’ll all wear tiny computers on our wrists, like a watch, and cars will drive themselves. “In the future,” he says, “the parts of our pasts we don’t like will roll up behind us like a scroll we can keep in a drawer until we die, when they’ll be unfurled into the cosmos, everything shaking free.” I don’t care about any of it, and that future of his sounds annoying and stupid.
I interrupt: “People always leave me.” My words twitch, like noises at night you can’t ignore. “My mother, when I was twelve. No one knows where she went.”
“You . . . ? What? No.” He swoops to draw me into his piney, citrusy smell, and I melt myself close, closer to his body. I’ve manipulated this hug from him, which is cheating. So what. He’ll discover he wants to hug me for the rest of this whole long future he’s planning. “That’s terrible,” he says. “You poor, sad girl. Oh, Pup.”
Why’s it so nice to hear that? I’m using my missing mother to scam a pity-hug from the love of my life who has an ex-wife and two kids he never mentioned. My brain’s not normal. I let him hug me anyway. Of course I tilt my head, that way they do in movies, and you bet he finally kisses me for real, for all-the-way real. Who cares we’re in the courtyard where anyone can see? All I care about is I’m right, and he likes all of it!
Back then, a world-famous psychic from Des Moines promised she’d find Donna. Donna’s dad was supposed to mail Donna’s favorite dolls and clothes and whatever. He wanted my help because he didn’t know what to send. “You were her friend,” he told me. “She’s got too many dolls.” He didn’t know Donna only liked Barbies now.
It was my first time in Donna’s house since she disappeared, first time in her bedroom since that night she asked me about her brother. Usually we played at my house, because we’d practically be alone, with my mother locked in her room and my father busy teaching classes at the university. “This quiet,” Donna told me, “it’s the best.” She had five awful brothers, and if we were in her house or yard, at least one was always lunging over to sock us on the shoulder or tickle-torturing us until we cried or looming in front of us with his mouth gaping, showing off chewed-up peanut butter sandwich. Stuff like that, all the time. And whatever happened when I wasn’t there.
Her dad must have sent away the brothers before I came over because I didn’t see them or her mother. Talk about quiet. Donna’s house wasn’t for sale yet, but the living room was empty. Just bare wood floors and smudgy, white walls. A single floor lamp, turned on though it was day. Couch and recliner, gone.
Donna’s room was creepy, of course. Someone had pushed an old sewing machine in there and propped a folded card table and chairs against the wall. The closet door hung wide open, showing her clothes perfectly lined up. But everything looked too small, almost like Donna shrank. Cluttering the closet floor was a mess of five boys’ worth of winter hats and boots. That closet was absolutely creepy. But so was everything else. Donna’s dad stood in the doorway, like he was afraid to follow me in. I smelled an empty smell. Maybe “empty” isn’t a smell, but here it was.
Her dad didn’t say, “Hurry up,” but I felt him thinking it, so I focused in on Donna’s desk: the pink lamp she got for her birthday, scattered pencils, a protractor, school folders from ancient classes I already got A’s in, and a stack of five yellow-cover Nancy Drew books she’d borrowed from me. Stuffed animals crowded her desk chair. Their faces looked sad, especially the ones with stitched-on smiles.
I rested one hand on top of the desk but snatched it back because I swear the wood was hotter than a stove burner.
After my mother went, my father loaded her stuff into boxes he drove to the dump. Only eerie, empty hangers. Like to be gone was so easy.
I pointed at one of the teddy bears, and Donna’s father looked at me, and I looked back because no way I was touching anything. He sighed, and stepped into the room, grabbed the teddy bear’s ear. Abruptly, I was so sorry I’d picked it because now it would never be back with its friends on this chair. I whirled and pointed quickly, but not so fast to seem random, though I was: a red dress in the closet, a steno pad on the desk where she wrote lists of favorite things like in the Sound of Music song we loved, a Malibu Barbie who made a good villain when we played. His arms filled up. Someone had to talk, so I said, “And I guess those Nancy Drew books. She loved Nancy Drew.” He nodded, did what I said, not knowing I was the one who loved Nancy Drew, that his daughter had these books only because I made her borrow them because I wanted us so bad to solve mysteries together, with hidden staircases and secret diaries. Not be a mystery.
The psychic told the Press-Citizen that Donna never left Iowa City, that she was hiding in darkness, waiting to be found. Nothing about the brothers, like I hoped. People complained how psychics were fake. I yelled at a teacher who said Donna was dead then got kicked off the school yearbook for being difficult. Donna’s mom was sent away for real for running around the neighborhood in her nightgown telling people it was their fault her precious baby disappeared. Then she changed to it being all her fault, which somehow was worse. She was a ghost that couldn’t die all the way. Donna’s father finally sold that house and moved away, so it was exactly like they’d never been part of our neighborhood. Never got my Nancy Drews back.
Before Donna disappeared, I slept over at her house. Her parents were out playing bridge, and some brother was watching us. Maybe the one who secretly cracked the ladder rung to the treehouse her father built. Donna whispered in my ear that her brother kissed her. Her breath smelled like the Lay’s potato chips we were eating. I’m the only person she told. I liked being important enough to hear someone’s deepest secret. “Never tell anyone,” she said. “No matter what. Or I’ll swear you’re a liar. And a baby.”
That’s what I thought about when my father said, “If you know something, you need to tell us. The police need our help.” When he said, “Don’t you want your friend found?”
My mother was there, all of us sitting at our assigned spots at the round dining room table. The room was getting small and dark, but no one flipped on a light. My mother was smoking, a whole pack burned down one by one. I could hardly breathe, watching all that smoke roll from her mouth like fog.
I know she itched to say it. The wrong girl went missing.
My father went on, puffed with importance: “Any tiny detail about Donna’s mood or boys she liked or if she talked about running away?”
Say it, I thought, I dare you. But all my mother said was, “This is all so sad. I don’t understand. How did this happen?” like somehow everything was her fault.
I noticed things about Donna’s mom and Suzanne and Tracy’s mom. Kool-Aid in their fridge, how they jumped in the car to drive us to the pool, the way they handed over quarters from their purse for candy at Drug Fair. Just so simple: you need money and here’s some. Not the way my mother sighed, struggled to sit straight in bed, shielding her face with one wobbly hand, her fuzzed eyes. “Grab my purse, Krista,” she’d mumble, her wave sending me in the wrong direction while my friends waited in the living room as I tore through the clothes piled on the dresser, frantic for her purse; ransacked the floor of her closet, searched the kitchen—anxiously calling, “Just a sec,” to my friends. Finally, there’s the purse on the table in the entryway, and I’m bursting-angry not to check there first, that she hadn’t told me where to look. Wait-wait-wait as she digs around, fumbling through Hy-Vee receipts my father wants to check and cases for sunglasses that were lost ages ago. “Heresa dollar,” she’d say, “izzat enough?” then hand me two. Except she didn’t hand them to me. She’d drop the crumpled bills on the bed, and I’d tiptoe close to pick them up, inhaling perfume sprayed during my purse-searching, attempting to mask the metallic smell I already knew was there. “Thank you,” I’d say, because if I didn’t, I’d get, “How’s one girl have such poor manners to not say thank you?” At Drug Fair, I’d treat Donna and Suzanne and Tracy to candy. “Anything you want!” That’s why they waited like that, keeping quiet. Why they invited me to walk to Drug Fair with them. How I kept them friends.
Before my mother left me, I never thought about who should be a mother and who shouldn’t. Everyone should be a mother! I should be a mother! Donna said, “What would you do if you had five boys in a row and then me?” Suzanne said, “At least your mom was hoping for you, Donna. My mother had five girls, still not getting the big important boy.” Tracy, Suzanne’s quiet sister, nodded and sighed. What should I say? “Guess your mother got it right,” they said. “Guess your mother got exactly what she wanted.”
My face glowed lava-hot, but I made myself laugh. I heard myself say, “Yep. It’s hard being perfect.” They didn’t know I knew the truth: I scared my mother away from more children. No sister or brother, just me alone, me, me, me, for the rest of her life.
They laughed, not because I was funny, but because we knew I wasn’t perfect, not even close, knew we were saying these things because we didn’t yet understand what we wanted to say: that Donna’s brothers are hateful, horrible bullies; that in a house of five girls, only the oldest is noticed; that one kid by herself is a terrible mistake of some kind, and no matter how hard that kid works to fix whatever that mistake is, she can’t. Probably she can’t even figure out what the mistake is.
When it came to the boys I liked, there seemed to be a timer that buzzed around five weeks, which is when I’d catch him pass a cute dog without petting it or he’d toss a gum wrapper on the sidewalk. Or he’d saunter into the movie theater where I worked, some willowy Barbie doll girl in his wake, and when he dropped the coins into my hand to pay for her small-popcorn-extra-butter, I’d see there was no chance, ever, that this boy could like me back. This boy was dandelion fluff dancing away—pretty to watch, slightly melancholy, but how it goes. To recover, I’d devour peanut M&M’s in my bedroom, listen to the saddest songs on my saddest record albums, scribble heartbreak poems for creative writing class.
That was high school, and much of college. Now, here in Arizona, I’m a fancy adult, with an apartment, and my job pays commission. Time to outgrow silly-girl crushes on boys with brash looks, boys who glide through rooms like sleek, single-minded killer sharks. It’s like a different timer’s going off: now it’s real love. Zero doubt. Brett’s different. He kissed me, he liked it, he likes me.
I don’t need to find my mother if I’ve found this.
When Brett doesn’t show on Tuesday, I’m fine. Maybe he has a cold or a dentist appointment. I’m alone for lunch in the courtyard, trying to love plain yogurt. It’s what my mother ate to stay skinny when she was bored of cottage cheese. I’m watching three dark-haired girls eating Tupperware salads from their laps, perched like crows in a line on the good picnic table instead of at it, their asses precisely where Brett and I had set our lunches last week. I face them from my table, nervous to put my back to them. When they laugh in unison, I know they’re talking about me. Then one shouts, “Hey, Krista where’s your boyfriend?” Their ruthless laughter, rippling right at me. “He call in sick, Krista?” another wedges in.
I’m choking down a mouthful of yogurt, so I grab that minute to think. Is Brett my boyfriend if they say he is? I hate they remember my name when I don’t know theirs. They’re always together when I’m alone. “He’s great,” I call, not confident I’ll say “boyfriend” without brainless giggling.
The third one says, “You know how this story goes, right?” She’s the niceish one, who on my first day told me the place down the street has happy hour margaritas on Thursdays and that we should go sometime. “When?” I asked, and she said, “Some Thursday.”
“What story?” I look straight at the nice one, imagining the others aren’t there.
“That story when you sleep with a guy then he never calls.”
“I never slept with him,” I say. Yet. Obviously I want to. The (two) college boys I knew were fumbly. Nothing about Brett is fumbly.
“A virgin,” says the first one. “So precious.” She clambers off the table, sandals crunching the gravel pathway to the door, the second one rushing to follow, but they don’t whisk inside. They linger, all of us watching the nice one flick her long hair then gather it up with one hand, as she says, “Brett sort of has this reputation. You could say.”
“I didn’t sleep with him,” I say. “But I’m no virgin.” My voice rises, sounding like I did when my mother claimed a headache to make me stop talking. “Anyway, I heard about his ex-wife. And the kids. I know everything, including that he likes me.” There’s this weird pause like I burped, like, such a surprise someone likes me. “He likes me,” I repeat.
“Tell her,” the mean one says.
“There’s no ex-wife,” the nice one says. “No kids. He makes stuff up to mess with people, mostly girls.”
I forget what Brett’s golden eyes look like for three seconds. At the same time: Well, okay, my brain whispers. No ex-wife. No kids. That’s easier. It’s good news in the end. “You’re jealous,” I shout. I want them to shout right back, creating ruckus and noise, so someone comes to yell at us, and they get fired. I stare at an ocotillo cactus in the courtyard.
The second one softens her voice: “Basically, he’s a dirty old man.”
“They shouldn’t let him keep working here,” the mean one says.
“We saw him kiss you,” the second one says. “So you should know.”
The nice one comes to sit next to me on the bench, so close her hair licks my shoulder when she flings it. She bites her bottom lip. Up close, one of her front teeth looks whiter than the others. “It was the same when I first started.”
“It’s not the same,” I say. “Whatever that was with you.”
“Listen to me,” she says. “Does he call you a secret name? Bring little gifts special just for you?”
“They are special for me,” I say.
“Amy’s trying to help,” the mean one calls.
Amy. The nice one. I hate her name. “No one here likes him,” I say. “You don’t know how really hard that is.”
She touches her fingertips to my sweaty arm. “People like you fine.”
I shake myself free, cross my arms and legs. Terrible body language on purpose!
“Anyway,” Amy says, standing up and brushing her thighs like this whole thing made her dirty. “There’s the truth.”
“You don’t know him,” I say. “Not like I do.”
“Nice that you think you’re different,” she says. “Special. When you’re not.”
I shoot back: “My mother left me when I was ten.” I choose ten, a more pathetic age, because I want Amy to feel extra sad for me.
She folds her arms across her chest, grimaces. “Krista,” she says. “That happened so long ago. This is now. And that guy’s no good.” There goes her hair, whipping around.
I hold my breath because if I collapse into a dramatic faint, those girls will feel sorry for me—but wait. Is that all, waiting for people to feel sorry for me? That seems like—and anyway, my body betrays me, gulping up air. “I’m going to make him love me,” I say.
She glances at her friends. “He’ll ask for money,” she says. “At least don’t fall for that. Probably also need a place to stay. Promise you’ll be careful.”
I picture golden-eyed Brett in my apartment, his giant backpack stashed in a corner. Brett frying us eggs over-easy for breakfast, toast popping up; Brett saying, “Be right back. I’m taking out the trash.” Those are all nice things. Everything I know about Brett is nice. I’ll make that the story here.
Somehow these salad girls are gone, probably off yakking about how dumb I am. Lunch is over, my yogurt container empty. There’s my supervisor shouting from the doorway. “It’s too much, Krista,” and she gives me some kind of warning that basically means I’m too much.
Is it so long ago, my mother? Is that true?
In the end, all the Latin words in the world don’t say what a cactus is, what it’s like to live inside a scar or to be fossilized like those fish on the wall, stuck in time forever.
On Wednesday, I’m in early like usual, and there’s Brett outside, his bike propped in the rack, unlocked, begging to be stolen. There’s a big stick in his hand, like he’s Moses in The Ten Commandments, which maybe is a gift for me? He says, “Let’s go.”
I nod, head toward the door because on every normal day “let’s go” means “let’s go to work.” But he doesn’t follow, and he’s pointing at my car. The smile on his face is so perfect and beautiful that I stop walking. I couldn’t even imagine that smile in my dreams, yet it’s here, all for me.
“Time for our hike,” he says.
I point to my sandals, my pale linen(-like) pants that I bought last night on double clearance at Goldwater’s to make myself feelbetter. (Extra ten percent off for applying for a store credit card.) “Now?”
“Now’s always the best time,” he says.
Sludge crowds my head, like “he lied” and “those girls said . . .” I’m mad at him. But I’m not. I love him so hard.
“What about work?” I say.
“They fired me,” he says. “Anyway, we’re both too good for this job. You know that.”
I don’t know that, not at all. Somehow I’m back at my car, pushing the button to unlock the doors. In clatters the stick, before he swings his backpack into the back seat. It clanks. You could fold up a small dead body in there, and there’s a flash of Donna in my mind, Donna in someone’s car. My mother in someone’s car. Me in this car. But it’s my car, so I imagine that makes me safe.
“You’re really fired?” I ask.
“Called me yesterday when I didn’t show, like they were waiting.” He shrugs. “Lasted a year, bought some time. Pain’s a great teacher.”
Which is something my mother might say. I stare into the rearview mirror as I back out. “Wrong. Pain is a terrible teacher.”
“Pup,” he says so earnestly, rolling down the window because of how hot this car gets with its black interior. “Your mom. I know. She’s messed up bad to leave a kid. But look at the lesson: here you are.”
Being left by you, I think. Phoenix drivers are crazy-fast, so I focus on driving, on his haphazard directions, on him solidly beside me.
We’re not actually at the Superstition Mountains, just the scrambly Arizona desert with the mountains looming like the triangles children draw. I park in a dusty lot at a trailhead with six parking spots, a bulletin board, and a lidded trash can. No bathroom. Mine’s the only car. “You’re a cool girl,” he tells me.
“I’m wearing sandals.” I wiggle my bare toes.
“Take my socks.” He unlaces his worn hiking boots, drags off both socks, then sticks his bare feet back into his boots. Sliding on his damp wool socks is disgusting but also thrilling. He likes me. I’m jinxing it, so I remind myself he’s forty, and I’m (almost) twenty-two, and he lied, and plus he’s fired.
He pulls a battered canteen from his backpack and grabs that big stick. He says, “Just a quick hike. To celebrate my new freedom.”
“What am I celebrating?”
“In the desert, everyone’s free,” he says. “Feel your freedom.”
I don’t know about that.
From inside a car, on a highway, Arizona deserts seem empty, like the landscape of the rejected and scorned: snakes, spiders, rodents, scorpions, vegetation so tough water means nothing. What exists at a hundred-plus molten degrees? What remains after anything fragile burns away? That’s not freedom, that’s desperation to survive.
He starts walking, like this is simple. I could not follow him. But I know I will, so I just do. I need a hat. My new pants are instantly dusty. I’ll be fired. And it’s probably my last time with Brett, whose golden eyes gleam in the sunlight like treasure. Today should be air conditioning and office chairs. But nobody likes a whiner, or nobody in Iowa did, so it’s probably the same here.
There’s so much silence in the desert, not just because Brett isn’t talking. I guess there’s the wind, the tromp of our feet, buzzing bugs. The mountains ahead of us, perpetually small and distant. I hear Brett’s breath, not because he’s panting but because I’m concentrating so hard on what quiet is. Feel the flow of blood my heart sends through my body, again and again. Hours pass, but really it’s twenty minutes.
“Can I talk?” I ask. Maybe he doesn’t hear because he doesn’t say yes or no. What’s that mean? One-sided love is so exhausting. But it’s the only kind I know. More hours pass, or maybe ten minutes. Enough time for a new set of clouds to drift in above.
That’s a prickly pear, I think, that’s mesquite. Or is it creosote? Or palo verde? Or the other one? The desert blurs. What I know for a hundred percent are prickly pear, so obvious with its flat pads, and saguaro’s arms. And spiky ocotillo. And furry-looking chollas.
There’s a noisy bird in one of the scrubby trees I can’t identify, chirruping frantically, like practicing scales over and over. “What’s that bird?” I ask.
“Mockingbird,” he says. “I thought everyone knew that.”
“The birds are different where I grew up,” I say.
“Tell me about them.”
I want him to care less about birds and more about me. But I can’t not answer. “Red, blue, brown, yellow,” I say. “Robins. Crows.”
“See,” he says. “I’ve never seen a robin.”
“You’re kidding,” I say. “I’ve seen a million.”
“That’s amazing,” he says.
“I’m exaggerating,” I say. “I never counted. You know that, right?”
“I love this about you,” he says.
Love. But only “this.” Which “this”? Why not more, why never enough? Both heels are sprouting blisters. I’m so thirsty. I’m bored of Brett’s sweaty back always in front of me, the swing of the stick. It’s too quiet here. I want to be the monsoon!
How long can someone live in questions without answers?
I say, “People at work said you don’t have an ex-wife. Or kids. They told me—”
“Stop.” He raises one hand like that’s stopping me.
“They told me you like lots of girls at work. That that’s . . . sort of your thing.”
Nothing’s more silent than a vast, open-sky desert. Except this feeling rattling me.
I say, “Am I just a ‘thing’?”
“Don’t wreck it,” he says.
I say, “What’s here to wreck?”
“Anyway, you know I’m thirty-five,” he says.
“You’re forty,” I say. “I saw your work ID. But I don’t care.”
“Pup,” he says, turning around. I get a friend hug, dad hug, pity hug. A “too bad for you” hug. He even kisses the top of my head, and it doesn’t much matter at this sweaty point, but I wish I’d washed my hair this morning. “I’m just never going to be that guy you want me to be.”
“I love you.” I say it, then I really say it: “I love you, Brett. For real. Like, love-love.” It’s the first time I say this to a real boy. First time to feel it for real. My lost mother’s as distant as those mountains. Maybe, I think, I don’t even need him to say the words back. Maybe, I think, whatever I’m given is enough. Maybe I’m happy with what there is.
Maybe, I think, maybe times a million. But no. Wanting more isn’t wrong. What’s wrong is wanting things from people who have nothing to give. As clear as that bird’s hyper song: It’s not wrong to want and need; it’s all there is.
I don’t know. An hour goes by, or a second. I feel stupid. It’s all my fault.
“I’m thirsty,” I say.
“Just a sip,” he says. “We don’t drink all the water at once.”
He hands me the canteen, and I drink and drink. The water’s warm, metallic, awful. Liquid rust.
“I drank it all,” I say handing over the empty canteen, after shaking it upside down to show him, to expel every drop. “I should be special to someone,” I say.
He balances the canteen in his palm, then frisbees it off into the desert. He’s got a great arm, so maybe the stories he told me about playing minor league ball for the Cubs are true, though probably not.
“You slept with Amy,” I say. “Why’s she more special than me?”
“I don’t even remember her name,” he says. “You’re someone different. I care, but I only know how to care this one way. Maybe not the right way, but that’s not my fault.”
“Then whose fault?” I ask. “Mine?”
He shakes his head, not an answer but in irritation. “Let’s go,” he says.
“Back to the car?”
“It’s a loop trail,” he says. “Another hour or so.”
“No,” I say. “My car. No more hiking. No more desert.”
“Suit yourself,” he says, and he pushes past me to be first again, and he starts marching forward. I hate Arizona, this desert. He’s walking fast, half-running, and his sweaty back looks furious, though that’s impossible. I tag behind, only because I’m afraid to be left alone, and it’s like that for a few minutes until he stops so suddenly I crash into him, and he joggles forward, then swears.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but you stopped and—”
“Shhh,” he says, swinging out a hand like crossing guards did as we walked to Twain Elementary, though there were barely any cars. “Don’t move,” he says. He plants his walking stick in the path in front of him, like it’s a fence pole.
Instantly I’ve got an itch along my spine, right in the middle, and I’ll die if I can’t reach it, and thinking about it makes it worse, so I slowly twist my arm back, getting my thumb close to where it itches, but then the itch moves higher, and right then I catch a leaky, swarmy hiss, a fast sound I can’t catch up to, like, well, exactly like what I imagine a rattlesnake sounds like.
No more itch! “Rattlesnake!” I shout.
“Shhh.” His arm span widens into total crossing guard mode, blocking me from moving forward on the trail. It should feel romantic that he’s saving my life, should mean something.
“Maybe it’ll go away,” I say. “Go look for its friend.”
“You don’t know much about snakes,” he says.
“I know nothing about snakes,” I say.
“It’s more afraid of us than we are of it,” he says. “But it sure wouldn’t like being stepped on.”
Well, I’m afraid, a little. But mostly I want to see it. How can I have a snake story to tell if I don’t even get to see the snake?
“Stay calm,” he says.
I’m sure he’s right. I read every plaque in the Botanical Garden about desert wildlife. In real life, being calm is always what people say to do. A thousand million adults have told me to “stay calm.”
I whisper, “I want to see the snake.” When Brett doesn’t respond, I speak in a regular voice: “Let me see the snake.”
“Shhh,” he says. “We just wait. Be still and wait.”
Well, I’ve been waiting my whole life for I don’t know what—my mother to come back, my missing friend to be found, for answers to these questions buzzing and building inside me—so waiting for a rattlesnake in the desert should be a cinch. My throat’s dry, the sun’s turning heavy. People die out here. I’m tired of being quiet. I’m thirsty.
“You’re a liar!” I shout. My words rocket around the vast emptiness of this desert, and I step off the trail, slap away Brett’s arms, bang into a prickly pear cactus, and clamor over some bunchy weeds. Right there on the path is a snake coiled and twisted in a stack of crooked loops, looking like a postcard picture: head poised, black tongue wagging, rattle shimmying in fury and fear. Look at it, desperate to be important and brave, this one snake all alone in this whole huge desert. Maybe everyone else is disgusted seeing a snake, especially a dangerous snake, up close, but I feel a surge of connection. I’m no psychic, but I know one hundred percent this snake won’t bite me. It’s like something in me understands this sad snake, exactly how it’s minding its own business, slithering around the rocks, being its own beautiful and glorious snake self, maybe thinking about eating a mouse, and here’s us barging in, because we just have to run around the desert today for no real reason, forcing this snake to rile itself up, to show off its scary rattle and its anger. Really, what it feels is fear. What it feels is loneliness.
Could a snake think all that? Could I?
I shift my weight from one blistery foot to the other, and Brett says, “Keep still.” I’m rooting for the snake, and I want somehow for it to know that. Then Brett says, “Can you take a few steps backwards, quietly and slowly?”
I can’t rattle, so I scream, but everything I have to say, all the things I feel, get swallowed into this desert that surrounds me.
The snake strikes, and Brett’s leg kicks back, and maybe the rattlesnake gets a bite of pants, or maybe the stick, or maybe Brett will die out here.
I can’t explain any of this, starting with why I screamed, and I bet I’ll never be able to. Because of course I can take quiet, slow steps backwards—who can’t do that? We played “mother may I” summer nights in the twilight with Donna the best at finding clever ways to move—“Mother, may I take two banana steps?” From Donna, I know horse kicks, a falling leaf, kitten crouch, a thousand things I don’t remember learning. So Brett saying, “A few steps backwards, quietly and slowly”: that’s clear, that’s easy. Babies could follow those directions.
So why do I run? Not that I’m a great runner, but Donna was, and we loved watching her go. I loved that she was a streak of red hair beating every boy but one in gym class. I loved her. She should have been my friend for life. But it’s hard running on a knotty desert path, so of course I trip, and the good thing is that I don’t crash into another cactus, but the bad thing is that sharp rocks are everywhere and the palm of one hand is scraped red and my knee’s bleeding. I roll onto my back and stare up at the blue sky, the cottony clouds. I look straight into the sun, but that hurts immediately. It all hurts.
I have to go back and rescue Brett, though it won’t be my fantasy of saving his life and him falling in love with me. I won’t suck out poison like we learned in Girl Scouts. I’ll drive him to the ER or his apartment, and that’ll be the end. Or maybe he’s fine, and he’ll lumber over, make noises about how dumb I am, how snakes are serious, how I could have seriously hurt myself and seriously hurt him. I’ll say I knew that snake would never bite me, and he’ll say, “You can’t know that,” and I’ll go, “There’s lots of things I can’t know that I guess I do know.”
He’ll talk, be mad. I’ll pretend I’m sorry. Let him stay a lonely genius tinkering around with wires or numbers or whatever he does. I had a mother, and now I don’t. I’ll never know why. This fact’s the dividing line of my life; she was a crummy mother, I know, but you only get the one you’re given, and I’ll always miss her and wonder what might have been—because when she was around, there was that chance she could change, right? That chance she’d fall in love with me, right? So I’ll always wonder about her and about that chance, but at the same time, I’ve got to live in and love what is.
I guess someone can do that. I guess I’m going to do that. I guess that’s me.
Brett looms above me, his body blocking the sun. His face is so screwed-up angry that I laugh. His shadow should cool on my sweaty, hurting self, but I’m not feeling that right now. He says, “What’s going on, Pup? Is this about what you said? I told you—”
I interrupt: “You can call me Krista now. That’s actually who I am.”
I’ll fall in love again, probably pretty fast, knowing me, maybe with that hot tub party guy, maybe with my supervisor’s boss because they won’t fire me after I tell them about my—no, after I remind them the reason I earn the highest commission is because I’m the best at this job. Maybe there’s someone to love I can’t imagine right now. I could discover the Lost Dutchman’s Mine deep in the Superstition Mountains and use that gold to buy fossil fish. Or be practical and get a new car. I was supposed to find something coming out here, and I found emptiness, and also I found that here’s like there, like anywhere, until you understand what you’re looking for, what you need. That the world answers when it’s ready.
Yes! The answer is yes! Yes, you can live a whole, huge life seeing questions without answers, and you know what? That’s precisely what I’m about to do.