I checked the truck. It was empty. In the tent I found her coat and mittens. Her shoes had been taken. I scrambled up a small hill and looked for her from there. I scanned for the shape of her among the old buildings, on the hills, along Cane Springs Road. Fence posts, black with moisture, strung across the valley like tombstones. Sickness thickened in my gut and my throat. She was gone.
I called for her again and again. I heard nothing, though surely my own voice echoed back to me. Surely the snow creaked under my feet when I walked through our camp and out to the ruins. Surely the frozen tendrils of creosote whipped against my legs when I began to run through the ghost town, up and down the gravel path. But all sound had left me except for a low, steady roaring, the sound of my own blood in my ears, of a car rumbling up the old road.
Suddenly my chest was burning. I couldn’t breathe. Layla. Layla. I crouched and pressed my bare palms against the frozen earth. The knees of my long johns soaked through, my fingers began to sting.
Then I saw a shape near the burnt remains of the schoolhouse. A panic as hot and fierce as anything—fiercer—rose in me. The slick pink vinyl of her backpack. I ran to it.
When I bent to pick it up, I heard something on the wind. Something like the high, breathy language my daughters speak to each other when they play. I followed the sound around behind the schoolhouse and found Layla squatting there in her pajamas, softly stacking one of her stone markers in the snow.
Hi, Dad, she said. The snow had reddened her hands and cheeks as though she’d been burned. She handed me a stone. Here you go, she said.
I took my daughter by the shoulders and stood her up. I raised her sweet chin so her eyes met mine, and then I slapped her across the face. She began to cry. I held her. The Chevelle drove up and down Cane Springs Road, the gravel under its tires going pop pop pop. I said, Shh. That’s enough. A child means nothing out here.
RONDINE AL NIDO
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
She will be thirty when she walks out on a man who in the end, she’ll decide, didn’t love her enough, though he in fact did love her, but his love wrenched something inside him, and this caused him to hurt her. She’ll move to an apartment downtown and soon—very soon, people will say, admiringly at times, skeptically at others—she will have a date with a sensible man working as an attorney, the profession of his father and brothers, in the office where she is a typist. They will share a dinner, and the next weekend another, then drinks, a midday walk through the upheaved brick sidewalks of her neighborhood, a Sunday-morning garden tour of his. On their fifth date she will allow him to take her to bed.
Before they met, he’ll have been a social worker, and after they make love he will tell her this, and about the terrible things he saw in that other life. He’ll begin—At CPS, there was this woman. She had this little girl. Beautiful. Two years old—then stop and lean down and put his lips to her hair. Do you really want to hear this? he’ll ask, as though just remembering that she was listening. He’ll feel her head nod where it rests on his chest and go on. About the Mexican woman who let her beautiful, bright two-year-old daughter starve to death in a motel room near the freeway. About the teenage boy, high on coke, who broke into the apartment next door and slit his neighbor’s throat. About the man who worked at the snack bar at the Sparks Marina, who lured a retarded girl into the men’s bathroom with a lemonade. About the father who made his son live under their porch in Sun Valley, about the hole the boy bored up through the floor so he could watch his stepmother brush her hair in the morning.
He will talk, and she will listen. It will be as though she’s finally found someone else willing to see the worst in the world. Someone who can’t help but see it. For the first time in her life, she will feel understood. When he finishes one story she’ll ask for another, then another, wanting to stack them like bricks, build walls of sorrow around the two of them, seal them up together. An uncontrollable feeling—like falling—will be growing in her: they could build a love this way.
Then, feigning lightness, she’ll ask him to tell her about something he did, something terrible. When he was a boy, maybe. It will be late. Watery light from a waxing moon will catch the corner of the bed, setting the white sheets aglow. Two candles—the man’s idea—will flicker feebly on the nightstand, drawing moths against the window screen. He will tell her about his younger brother and a firecracker and a neighbor’s farmhouse in Chatsworth, of straw insulation and old dry wood that went up like whoosh so fast it didn’t seem fair, of running around to the front door and ringing the bell—she will find this curious, the bell—and helping the neighbor, an elderly woman, down the front steps. Now you show me yours, he’ll say, and laugh. He will have a devastating laugh.
By then, there will be much to tell—too much. A pair of expensive tropical lizards she’d begged for, then abandoned in a field to die when their care became tedious. Birthstone rings and a real gold bracelet plucked from a friend’s jewelry box at a sleepover. Asking an ugly, wretched boy with circles of ringworm strung like little galaxies across his head to meet her for a kiss at the flagpole, laughing wildly when he showed. These she’ll have been carrying since girlhood like very small stones in her pocket. The sensible man will be waiting. Who can say why we offer the parts of ourselves we do, and when.
Our girl is sixteen years old. Her palms press against the stinging metal of a heat rack. Her best friend, Lena, a large-toothed girl from Minnesota, stands across from her, palms pressed against the rack, too. Their eyes are locked, and a skin scent rises between them. This is their game, one of many. In the pocket of our girl’s apron rests a stack of fleshy pepperoni, their edges curling in the swelter. Behind her, the slat-mouthed pizza oven bellows steadily. A blackened sheet of baking parchment floats in a dish of hot grease. The grease has a name, and as our girl tells the story this name will return to her, along with other details of this place, which had until now left her—the flatulent smell from a newly opened bag of sausage, the flimsy yellowed plastic covering the computer keyboards and phone keypads, the serrated edge of a cardboard box slicing her index finger nearly to the bone. Naked in her own bed with a man for whom she feels too much too soon, our girl will recall the name of the grease—Whirl, it was called—and the then-exquisite possibility of searing off her fingerprints.
Lena, her friend, finally pulls her hands from the rack, shaking the sting from them. You win, she says.
Our girl waits a beat, gloating, then lifts her palms from the surface, lustrous with heat. She folds a pepperoni disk into her mouth. Let’s go again, she says.
Soon, our girl is cut loose for the night by the manager, a brick-faced, wire-haired woman named Suzie. She goes to the back of the restaurant, to a bathroom constructed from Sheetrock as an afterthought. At a row of metal sinks outside the bathroom, two delivery boys wash dishes. One of the boys, a nineteen-year-old named Jeremy, has convinced himself that he loves our girl, though she has already once declined an invitation to watch Dawn of the Dead in the single-wide trailer he has all to himself on his mother’s boyfriend’s property.